Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune
Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.
Retouching Lubitsch
The great French director Jean Renoir once said that Lubitsch was the man who invented Hollywood, and what he meant was that Lubitsch was chiefly responsible for inventing the classic Hollywood technique of “invisible” editing.
The Best Books in Rastafari Studies
From Senegalese Muslim Rasta making pilgrimage to the Mouride holy city of Touba to Rasta-identifying Maori nationalists in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and from Israeli Dreads fostering philo-Zionism in Tel Aviv to Kyoto-based Zen Rastas looking to reclaim the Japanese environment, Rastas are everywhere.
“A Plot to Which There Isn’t More Than Meets the Eye, But Then There Is”
Moon is saying it’s really important for you to decide what kind of writing to pursue; there are entertainers and there are writers of literature.
The Exchange of Image and Meaning: A Conversation
Marking the hours is an archetypal human occupation, and there are many religious and folkloric associations with the hour of daybreak, the threshold between darkness and light, between being in a dream and being awake.
Restoring Coherency to Byron
Peattie suggests that “Dieting for Byron represented a heroic endeavour, to free the spirit from the body, a battle for independence that paralleled (if it did not also reflect) his enthusiasm for other struggles for independence.”
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and The Uncertain Future of French Secularism
Bruckner comes to this debate with the same ideas he has always had—Enlightenment anti-religious, libertarian, liberationist.
A Language For the Body
Dorothy Hood worked on a heroic scale, with large expanses of color fields juxtaposed with black zones and strange, intermittent areas where the painting is patterned, echoing natural forms like canyons and oceans.
Envy and Imitative Desire
Education, once a promise of a better future for all, now seems a desperate tournament by which some escape the miserable fate that awaits many others.
Suburban Wars
Carr maps the birth of industrial music as a “poetic response” to the end of the Industrial Era, when the decline of manufacturing economies thrust the Midwest into financial crises from which the area never fully recovered.
Funny and Terrifying: Robyn O’Neil’s Apocalyptic, Dystopian Humor
Fires are burning, flus are spreading, and Robyn O’Neil’s drawings aren’t going to make you feel any better about it.
Poetry At the Threshold: Reflections on a New Hölderlin Translation
For Hölderlin, language is not an instrument of communication, a tool designed to enable us to transmit or convey “information;” it constitutes, rather, nothing less than the supreme event of human existence, a world-forming power that exposes us to the highest possibilities of our being.
Painting After the Digital Revolution
Throughout Laura Owens, viewers can see what they might interpret as evidence of her female, mother-human embodiment—buttons, childrens’ cartoons, macramé, her son, cut paper, puff paint—but playfulness in Owens’s work predates her motherhood and competes with it.
The Publisher’s Reader Extraordinaire
From his earliest years Garnett deplored the insularity and what he saw as the anti-intellectualism of British authors and the British reading public—their philistinism, in fact.
A New Picture of Oscar Wilde
Frankel shows how the letter to Douglas changed over the course of its long composition from a bitter excoriation of the spoiled aristocrat as the agent of the artist’s ruin to a deeply reflective spiritual autobiography of the sort that Wilde read in prison (such as Augustine’s Confessions).
The Best Books on the Impact of World War I
Sheehan’s book is a piercing explanation of why Americans and Europeans today have such different views about the nature and purpose of war.
