Mutability and Mortality
Perhaps my favorite in this set of personal homages is “Ode to the Arts and Humanities Staff” which sings the praises of the otherwise unseen and unsung heroes, the clerical and support staffs that keep universities and academic departments running.
Translating the Chinese Diaspora
For many of the characters in Yan’s stories, particularly those who find themselves alone in a foreign land, the feeling of always wishing to be elsewhere captures a state of longing that appears to be the most permanent fixture of their interrupted lives.
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.
The Best Books on the American Revolution
Nash’s achievement is not merely to show the “underside” or “history from the bottom up,” but to show how the ideas of the Revolution motivated men and women across the economic spectrum.
The Greatest Judge in American History?
The Supreme Court was Marshall’s vehicle for instituting the Federalist vision of government even after the Federalist Party had perished. Marshall strengthened the Supreme Court, which previously had the appearance of triviality.
Scholarship, Truth, and Islam
What Bevilacqua describes as “the Republic of Arabic letters” was the emergence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a number of European scholars who, although Christian, championed Islam as a worthwhile subject of investigation.
The Conscience of an Immigrant American Conservative
If we face the prospect of a civil war prompted by immigration, you don’t finish this book imagining its imminence. There is ample reason, however, to create a new national approach to international migration to the United States.
An Administrative Life
Gray remarks in her preface, “I began my training for the academic profession at a time now wistfully (and somewhat mistakenly) called a golden age, and retired in what may eventually be deemed an age of bronze.”
To Whom Does Music Belong?
Like Karen Carpenter, Lhasa de Sela and her family pursued an American vision of success, even if Lhasa’s story was more invested in the pursuit of personal fulfillment than of normalcy.
The (Syn)Aesthetics of Conspiracy
Since con-spiracies, imagined or true, (etymologically) presuppose the ‘breathing together’ of their wicked wire-pullers, it does not surprise that the artistic response is to picture or craft toxic togetherness, outrageous overlaps and acid amalgamations.
Binaries, Buddhism and the Art of Reminders in the Work of Jacob Hashimoto
In one sense, there is something straightforward about what Hashimoto does with his materials and the visions he produces. What you see is what you get: translucent geometric solids that aggregate into a meandering whole.
