Every Kenneth Lonergan production is, at its center, a story of nihilism resisted or indulged. Usually the characters engaged in these struggles haven’t yet made it out of their twenties. In his breakout play, This Is Our Youth...
On November 21, when three International Criminal Court judges issued arrest warrants for leaders of Israel and Hamas, the decision drew a frenzy of hostile and often ill-informed reactions from many American lawmakers and defenders of...
Bellamy the sea star is tired of feeling “small and unnoticed” on his rock in the reef—if only he could be as big and important as the North Star that shines high above the ocean in the night sky. Bellamy draws up plans (with apparently...
The story begins with biblical figures Isaiah and Micah delivering prophecies. Isaiah is depicted as a drunkard whose prophecies are intentionally ambiguous, while Micah communicates mostly with a group of cats. The latter learns of...
In the mid-14th century, Jeanne de Flandre, a Breton aristocrat, is an independent and insightful woman happily married to John Montfort, who respects her intellect and counsel “because she always used her insights to further his...
Riley never meant to be a photographer; he was a professional skateboarder until a bad landing put him in a coma. When he woke up, his job on the tour was gone, and now he feels dizzy whenever he tries to get back on a board. Eventually,...
Having fled the bombing in Königsberg, 11-year-old Asta and 9-year-old Pieta are living with their mother on their grandparents’ farm during the final months of World War II when the Red Army attacks. They’re forced to flee to the ships...
Following the success of her novels Chemistry (2017) and Joan Is Okay (2022), Wang returns with the story of Keru and Nate, a Chinese American woman and a white man who meet at Yale, fall in love, and get married. Some years later, they...
It’s 1960 and Gabriel Dax is flying home to England after interviewing Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba when a series of “strange coincidences” begins. He’s upgraded to first class and a woman on the plane is reading one of his...
Ollie has ambitious intentions for dog sitting Milo, her grandmother’s puppy, but those plans are spoiled when he chews up her drawing, a gift intended for Grandma when she returns from visiting friends. The girl scolds the little dog...
Every good family saga features a wedding, and this one boasts two. First, Alina marries Fedir. The newlyweds receive land with a dacha built on it to set them up for the future. Soon they’ll have a “sea of gold”—sunflowers that provide...
Tomorrow’s Parade Day in Breezy Valley, a city populated by anthropomorphic animals, but its sick and injured residents still need help. At the hospital, doctors, nurses, and other vital personnel spring into action. As this fast-paced...
Born in Wales, Owen walks a fine line in 1377 York, where competing forces may tear Britain apart. He knows little of Tom’s life before he bought the York Tavern, married Bess 10 years later, and together, turned the inn into a thriving...
Robin, a nonbinary kid who lives with their uncle Miles, sits alone in the basement, bored and lonely, as they do every night. Suddenly, a “tall figure in a thundery coat” enters: the Cat-Headed Wanderer. The dapper, anthropomorphic...
Journalist Cuadros, author of Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country , has immersed himself in Brazil’s expansion into its Amazonian frontier, a process that began early in the 20th century, exploded...
Katia Daniels hasn’t followed the typical path for a Black woman in Troy, Alabama, in 1967. At 40, she’s devoted to her job as director of the Pike County Group Home for Negro Boys, where she oversees the care of neglected and abused...
Journalist Nixey delves into the sometimes scant evidence of the religious losers of early-Christian-era history. In doing so, the author clarifies the extent to which the Christian faith has evolved despite being, at one time, just one...
The story riffs on the ancient Chinese “Legend of the White Snake,” in which a krait and a viper made a pact to be sisters forever. The krait yearned to become human, so the viper, though happy in her skin, agreed to transform too. For...
After a prologue clearly inspired by the climactic chapter of Frank Norris’ epic 1901 novel The Octopus , Lovesey shows his franchise hero—still resisting the push to retirement—reluctantly accepting the invitation his old deputy Julie...
Perpetually 17-year-old Casper was adopted by the Belamys after being found newly turned and abandoned. Now he’s part of the wealthy and powerful “royal vampiric family of the American East.” He’s been promised a trip to Europe to see...
Sofiya and her friends, including bestie Cedric, who’s Nigerian Ukrainian, are regarded as “the smart kids” and targeted by the rich clique. Sofiya, who has Russian, Ukrainian, and Tatar heritage, has gotten in trouble over her squabbles...
“The act of probing into the future need not be predictive to be useful,” writes historian Adamson. Instead, considering what the future might look like can focus attention on the good and bad of the present. Adamson opens with a...
Among the most memorable interactions I’ve ever had with artists occurred during a trip I made to New Mexico in August 1992 to interview Susan Rothenberg for a Vanity Fair profile. It had been three years since she wed her...
Jorie Graham’s poem in our December 5, 2024, issue begins: The Killing Spree whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefieddeath, it was here to stay, it actuallyhad nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to...
Wild petunias slowly go blind and a starched nurse races to your bed to find your quick hawk gaze fixed on a blue mahoe branch scraping the louvre glass, its cellophane sound blurs a gesture of recoil or beckon that transmits the ginger...
Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.
The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.
Richard Powers's Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.
In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.
Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas's current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.
North Atlantic wind tries to tear the roof off the hill, throws all the sea’s abrasives at it, but the tuckamore grew up in this house, body shaped by the timeless occupation of a back bent low, hands in the dirt, working at the...
After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.
A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America's factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.
For Shakespeare’s characters the possibility of a second chance could be their undoing or their salvation. For the playwright, his words gave him many lives.
Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.
Donald Trump’s election places a new burden on a Supreme Court already operating under a harsh public spotlight. This is a Court, after all, that in recent months has rejected a constitutional challenge to Trump’s ballot eligibility and...
I feel we’ve been circling the drain for months and now are being rinsed down the plughole. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’m nauseous and have difficulty breathing. If I looked in the mirror—which I do often these days, purely as a...
One emerging consensus in these post-election days is that woke ideology has lost. Harris ran an impressively unwoke campaign. But as James Carville said, “we couldn’t get the stench off” the woke messages transmitted by, among others,...
In the days since the election, I’ve found myself revisiting an essay on the journalist’s role in a free society by the Reverend Levi Jenkins Coppin, editor of the AME Church Review, included in Irvine Garland Penn’s influential 1891...
Since about the beginning of the present century, authoritarianism has been on the rise the world over. In China, Xi Jinping has positioned himself as the country’s ruler for life, ending what had been a halting, fitful movement toward...
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my four-year-old daughter’s future, specifically her access to legal abortion. My answer: not in California, and not with an abortion...
Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating people who are paid to think about politics. His appeal has been consistently underestimated. It has also been, just as consistently, overcomplicated. The substance of his style is...
It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be...