In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual C.L.R. James. They were being filmed by Mike Dibb, who had produced John...
Vienna regularly ranks among the world’s most livable cities. A long tradition of municipal government by Social Democrats has made for famously affordable housing and well-run infrastructure. There is also a level of diversity that...
In February 2023 the photographer Sohrab Hura mounted an unusual show on the upper floor of a gutted factory on the smoky margins of New Delhi. Although it lasted only a few days, Half-Moving brought together, for the first...
A young child with black hair and rosy cheeks lovingly gathers stuffies and household pets before bringing them to bed. Layered lines and textured shapes with bright contrasting colors reveal different scenes of each sleeping zodiac...
Katherine “Kip” Baker, nearly 15, can’t believe that one year ago, she was a lonely only child, stuck in the middle of nowhere. Since rescuing donkey Liberty Biscuit and horses Raven and Fire, much has changed. Her daddy let her keep the...
Throughout this cheery book, narrated in jaunty verse, several diverse families explain that they always love each other. Relying on energetic, colorful digital illustrations that brim with warmth and humor, this tale demonstrates that...
Set in 1947, Tracy is a recent war veteran and the youngest cop ever to make detective in “The City.” He’s still struggling to come to grips with the horrors he experienced while in battle. After a crime reporter and an alderman are...
Hugo and his dino sidekick made their debut in a flurry of messy, creative backyard adventures. In their second outing, their antics take them out of this world, on a fantastic, apparently imaginary voyage to the planet of Space Tigers....
After Lalo Villalobos, 19, tracks down the vampiro who killed his parents, he ends up being turned into one himself rather than enacting the revenge he wanted. Using his newfound supernatural strength, Lalo escapes and returns home to...
Rowland is a respected historian at the University of Notre Dame who has written a series of books about the art of the Renaissance. This collection of essays focuses on artists who “lied”: that is, who were able to depict reality in a...
Dubbed “quirky” by her mother (an assessment readers will likely agree with), Millie narrates her own well-paced story in a flow of verbiage she often has trouble stemming. She is “the boss” but defers to her mom, who happens to be the...
Timid Bigfoot usually holes up inside his cave, afraid to venture out. Everyone makes loud, terrifying noises whenever they see him. But at least he has other misunderstood monster pals who appreciate his plight, among them Nessie, who...
Twelve-year-old Mendel’s incapable of doing anything right. When he hugs his mother, he knocks her into the washtub. While setting the table, he lights the table on fire. And when he chops wood, he almost decapitates his sister. Mendel’s...
This graphic novel opens on a snowy evening at Hillock College, where the semester is off to a bumpy start for Molly Song and her friend Lou Kingston. Molly is reeling from a recent breakup with her girlfriend, Olene Reed, who dumped...
Veteran film writer McBride clearly esteems Cukor’s “rich, multifaceted, deeply personal” worldview as expressed in his oeuvre. He ascribes Cukor’s masterful conveyance of nuance in human behavior, of subtext, to the director’s own...
Looking back, Corey wonders how much of his childhood was real. His family, who present white, lived in a remote, rural part of California, so his mom was his “teacher…entertainer…and partner in crime.” His dad, though loving, was more...
Poetic text describes a child’s active grandmother as she “moves to tai chi beats” (“ Slow. Firm. Focused ”) and walks home in the autumn leaves (“ ka-runch, ka-runch, ka-runch ”). At home, the two prepare dumplings, dancing in the...
Sir Horley Comewithers and Arabella Tarleton were good friends once upon a time, but life has taken them in opposite directions. Sir Horley, who is extravagantly gay but miserably in love with Belle’s (now taken) twin brother, spends his...
Sonoka Shimauchi’s family life has always been troubled and enigmatic. Her mother, Chizuko Shimauchi, was raised in the Morning Shadows orphanage without any knowledge of her parents. After Sonoka’s biological father refused to leave his...
Siiri and Aina are best friends, having grown up together in pre-Christian Finland. Despite the looming prospects of marriage and motherhood, the recent disappearances of other girls, and Swedish invaders from the south, they are able to...
Jia’s family owns “the biggest restaurant in Chinatown,” and everyone has been busy preparing for Chinese New Year for weeks. Today, Father’s cooking in the kitchen, Mother’s carrying plates, Aunty’s standing on a ladder putting up...
Sacco uses words and illustrations to document stories: He’s a self-described comics journalist. He has combined both forms to great effect in numerous works of graphic nonfiction, including Palestine and Safe Area Goražde , that tell of...
Druskininkai is a hilly, forested area in southern Lithuania, near the border with Belarus and Poland. Its name derives from druska, which means salt. Over thirty mineral springs pocket the ground. Since the nineteenth century...
One day, Dustin is planning to spend an epic summer in Japan with his baseball team, playing the sport he loves more than anything. The next, he’s at the funeral of his 20-year-old cousin, a college baseball player with an undetected...
There is a dream of Rome, and it goes like this: a once glorious republic, now fallen into tyranny, will be glorious again. This is the political vision that the aging philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) invokes in...
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to “close the border” on his first day back in office. That won’t happen, but he’s sure to clamp down on immigration in other ways. “The president and his legal team have four years to appoint...
The American Academy of Arts and Letters sits at the back of Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights, flanked by Boricua College and the Hispanic Society Library and Museum. It is one of eight Beaux Arts buildings tucked into this...
When I first spoke to David about the day US government agents took his son Arbi from him, the presidential elections felt a long way off. It was 2022 then, just before Thanksgiving. Sitting in his tiny apartment in San Diego, he cried...
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...
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.