As the cherry trees and the Bradford Callery Pears began to bloom in New York, defying the notably erratic spring weather, a constellation of exhibitions worth paying attention to also appeared. They included paintings and...
Read MoreIt has been a legendarily terrible theater season in New York. Only six new musicals opened on Broadway, less than half the usual number, two of them (Queen of Versailles and Beaches) dead on arrival. Non-musical works on the...
Read MoreGregory Orr’s latest poetry book, We Interrupt This Broadcast,[1] revisits many of the themes and experiences of his previous collections. Now in his seventy-ninth year, the poet’s mood is reflective and elegiac as he...
Read MoreAnthony Trollope was nearing forty years old when he published The Warden, a short novel which brought him recognition and would eventually become the opening book of the six Barsetshire chronicles, for some readers his most...
Read MoreAm I a woman, she thought calmly, or an intellectual monster? —“Bang-Bang You’re Dead” Perhaps all biographers should admit that their subject is a mystery. Novelists know they are involved in mystery and manners....
Read MoreIt’s a very good season for story collections, and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few. One is a novel-in-stories; two are collections by literary icons; one is a debut collection published by a university press; and one...
Read More— In 2010, only a dozen years after Frank Gehry’s remarkable star turn in Bilbao, Newsweek featured an article titled “The Death of Starchitecture.” “The phenomenon of using iconic architecture to promote a city,...
Read MoreHow does it start the sea has endless beginnings —Alice Oswald, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea This is an essay about similes and the sea, and about shipwrecks. It’s about Homer’s Odyssey, and the works of two contemporary...
Read MoreBy David Mason | Poetry, Subscriber Only
Citizens of the Wind Go then, citizen Of the wind. —Seamus Heaney Finding the glass, the ice in joy, the clean cold of it, the light entering and bent and set free, because I didn’t know I felt it...
Read MoreTrying to Write a First Love Poem at Seventy Should a troubadour happen to drop by, Lute slung over an Occitan shoulder, Say I’m sitting by the picture window, Looking at the sandhill cranes flying past, Smiling at their...
Read MoreAt the Grave of Tiem Duc Bui Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best. —Sophocles If it were truly best not to be born, Or if our kids had gone their separate ways, Then I would not be here today to...
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