Susan Sontag In ‘Sontag,’ the Author’s Myth Takes Center StageThe New York Times - By PARUL SEHGALAll her life, Susan Sontag, a voracious moviegoer, insisted on sitting in the same seat in theaters: third row, center. I can’t recommend it, not if you value your neck. But it’s where she sat, and the
Edward Snowden In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are PersonalThe New York Times - By JENNIFER SZALAIRevealing state secrets is hard, but revealing yourself in a memoir might be harder. As Edward Snowden puts it in the preface of “Permanent Record”: “The decision to come forward with evidence of government
Confronting Grief, Mental Illness and Marginalization, in VerseThe New York Times“Though I was born in America / I wasn’t born American,” says the speaker of the long title poem in Giménez Smith’s latest collection. How then is one “naturalized” into “Americanness”? She tells us: became
Bill McKibben 2019 Festival Albertine to Take On Climate ChangeThe New York Times - By PETER LIBBEYThe coming Festival Albertine, an annual gathering of American and Francophone activists, intellectuals, writers and artists, will focus on a truly international topic: climate change. The Cultural Services
The Arts A Translator’s Tribute to the Lifesaving Power of WordsThe New York Times - By EMILY RAPP BLACK“Homesick,” by the award-winning translator Jennifer Croft, is a coming-of-age story that includes all the “firsts” readers might expect from a narrative about identity formation: first loss, first love,
Green New Deal Is the Green New Deal Realistic? Two Sympathetic Authors Weigh InThe New York Times - By JEFF GOODELLON FIRE The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal By Naomi Klein THE GREEN NEW DEAL Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth By Jeremy Rifkin
The Arts Two Lifetime Crooks Wait for a Missing Daughter, With Shades of BeckettThe New York Times - Dwight GarnerMaurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, the antiheroes of the Irish writer Kevin Barry’s buoyant third novel, “Night Boat to Tangier,” are former drug runners — they’re aging and existentialist and twinkling
The Arts More and More Children Are Feeling Anxious. This Graphic Novelist Is Trying to Help.The New York Times - By SCOTT STOSSELWhen you’ve been in psychotherapy for as long as I have, you end up talking to your therapists from time to time about writers — Freud and Kierkegaard, let’s say, or Brené Brown and Tara Brach — whose
The Arts More and More Children Are Feeling Anxious. This Graphic Novelist Is Trying to Help.The New York Times - Scott StosselThis article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the author’s surname several times. She is Raina Telgemeier, not Telgemaier. When you’ve
Books Meat Is Murder. But You Know That Already.The New York Times - Mark BittmanWE ARE THE WEATHER Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast By Jonathan Safran Foer Jonathan Safran Foer’s second book of nonfiction is an eye-opening collection of mostly short essays expressing both despair
The Arts She Escaped From Nxivm. Now She’s Written a Book About the Sex Cult.The New York Times - By JESSICA BRUDERSCARRED The True Story of How I Escaped Nxivm, the Cult That Bound My Life By Sarah Edmondson with Kristine Gasbarre In 2005, Sarah Edmondson, 28, embarked on a weeklong Caribbean cruise dedicated to and
Chris Rock Chris Rock Is Writing a Book on Race and RelationshipsThe New York Times - By PETER LIBBEYChris Rock, the Emmy-winning comedian and two-time Oscars host, has been talking about race and relationships since he began doing standup in the 1980s. Those who haven’t seen him onstage will soon be
How a Dying Man Wrote a Timeless NovelThe New York Times - By JOSEPH LUZZI“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” With these words, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” announced a paradox of modern Italian history, as elites frenetically
Rachel Cusk Said She Was Done With Autobiography. These Essays Suggest Otherwise.The New York Times - By MEGHAN O’GIEBLYNIn a 2017 profile in The New Yorker, Rachel Cusk proclaimed that she had “lost all interest in having a self.” Writers are sometimes given to flamboyant statements of this kind — as are religious fanatics
Love Among the RuinsThe New York Times - By MICHAEL PYEThe English fenlands are a gift for a writer. Full of risk, they’re marshes where islands form out of silt and reeds, drift and then break apart, where the boundaries between land and water can’t be drawn
New & Noteworthy Visual Books, From Disney to DragThe New York TimesTHEY DREW AS THEY PLEASED Vol. 5: The Hidden Art of Disney’s Early Renaissance, the 1970s and 1980s, by Didier Ghez. (Chronicle, $50.) After Walt Disney’s death in 1966, his studio carried on his legacy
News Calls for Kavanaugh’s Impeachment Come Amid New Misconduct AllegationsThe New York Times - Sandra E. GarciaSeveral Democratic presidential candidates called for the impeachment of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Sunday after The New York Times published new information about allegations of sexual misconduct him,
Obituaries Gyorgy Konrad, Writer and Dissident in Communist Hungary, Dies at 86The New York Times - The Associated PressGyorgy Konrad, a writer and sociologist who was a major figure in Hungary’s dissident movement under Communist rule, died on Friday at his home in Budapest. He was 86. His family confirmed the death and
The Arts The Far Side Teases Its ReturnThe New York Times - George Gene GustinesA new era of the The Far Side, the newspaper strip by Gary Larson, is coming. Fans noticed over the weekend that the strip’s official website had been updated with a new cartoon and a message: “Uncommon,
Food & Dining But Does It Tell You When a Melon Is Ripe?The New York Times - Florence Fabricant“The Melon” is Amy Goldman’s fifth book, and as with her other titles, it’s a visual stunner and a revelation. It represents nine years of cultivating, studying, tasting and having Victor Schrager on to
The Arts A Dazzling, Sweetly Aching New Novel From Jacqueline WoodsonThe New York Times - By R.O. KWONIs there a more fraught, vilified figure in American letters — in worldwide letters, perhaps — than the mother who abandons a child? To be a mother who goes away, physically or emotionally, is widely to
Poetry A Rebel French Poet Draws New Followers to the Hometown He HatedThe New York Times - By NORIMITSU ONISHICHARLEVILLE-MÉZIÈRES, France — When Bernard Colin took over as caretaker of this city’s cemetery 27 years ago, his predecessor gave him some remarkably non-prescient advice: “Don’t worry, you won’t be
Susan Sontag A Big New Biography of Susan Sontag Digs to Find the Person Beneath the IconThe New York Times - By NINA SIEGALUTRECHT, Netherlands — UTRECHT, Netherlands — When asked what she was best known for, Susan Sontag, the formidable 20th-century public intellectual, essayist, novelist and political activist, often told
Food & Dining ‘I Think You Need to Rewrite It’: Ruth Reichl on What Makes an Editor GreatThe New York Times - By RUTH REICHLHalfway through my last memoir, my editor, Susan Kamil, said, “Maybe you should just move on. This isn’t working.” I threw the phone across the room. I’d been working on the book for a couple of years,
Books The Week in BooksThe New York TimesWe take the weekend to highlight recent books coverage in The Times: In their best-selling new book, “She Said,” the Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey recount how they broke the Harvey Weinstein
Brett Kavanaugh ‘The Education of Brett Kavanaugh’ Takes a Hard Look at the Supreme Court Justice and His AccusersThe New York Times - By HANNA ROSINTHE EDUCATION OF BRETT KAVANAUGH An Investigation By Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly Nearly a year after the fateful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have become
Obituaries Anne Rivers Siddons, Novelist Whose Muse Was the New South, Dies at 83The New York Times - By RICHARD SANDOMIRAnne Rivers Siddons, whose popular novels, set largely in the South, took female characters on emotional journeys that touched on the region’s racial and social attitudes, died on Wednesday at her home
Obituaries Kiran Nagarkar, Novelist Who Chronicled Mumbai Life, Dies at 77The New York Times - By SHALINI VENUGOPAL BHAGATKiran Nagarkar, an Indian writer whose celebrated novels and plays addressed subjects like 16th-century Rajasthani royalty, the life of the working poor in Mumbai and religious fundamentalism, died on
The Arts Yes, They Found It in a BoxThe New York Times - By TINA JORDANIn 2013, 21 years after Theodor Seuss Geisel — a.k.a. Dr. Seuss — died, his widow was cleaning out a closet when she stumbled upon a box of her husband’s work that she had never seen before. Audrey Geisel
