February 13, 2023
By Jennie Hann
It’s hard to fathom now, but just over 100 years ago the novelist Herman Melville had sunk into obscurity. Wildly popular at one point in his career, the author nevertheless
February 10, 2023
By Diego Báez
Paul Hlava Ceballos’s banana [ ] (University of Pittsburgh Press), born of Banana [ ______ ] / we pilot the blood, his collaboration with poet Quenton Baker and creative scholar Christina
February 9, 2023
By Jane Ciabattari
Namwali Serpell is an evocative, erudite, and original writer. She mixes Gothic and Afrofuturist styles in The Old Drift, her first novel, a three-family saga that spans nearly two centuries
February 8, 2023
By Colette Bancroft
Annie Proulx’s towering gifts for narrative and description have been pillars of her award-winning fiction, and she brings those gifts to her slim, powerful nonfiction book Fen, Bog & Swamp
February 7, 2023
By Heather Scott Partington
“Dancers do not work from texts because there are no texts,” Jennifer Homans writes in her resplendent biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House). “Dances are passed… from
February 6, 2023
By May-lee Chai
Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra (Two Lines Press) is a gorgeous book of insightful, often poetic essays. It’s the autobiography of a woman-identified writer who is deeply examining multiple creative acts
March 16, 2022
By Michael Schaub
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky (Yale) “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary,” Robert Walser once wrote. “We already see
March 16, 2022
By Michael Schaub
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain (Beacon) The title of Keisha N. Blain’s magnificent biography of Fannie Lou Hamer comes from
March 16, 2022
By Carlin Romano
Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov (Penguin Press) A few months into my five years of teaching philosophy at Bennington College, a faculty colleague, during
March 15, 2022
By Carlin Romano
Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin Press) Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky, a seven-year-old Jewish boy from Berlin, made it by ship to the U.S. in May, 1939. Exquisite timing,