Reading Melville in Post-9/11 America Reading Melville in Post-9/11 America
The author's half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, provides fascinating insight into issues of slavery, freedom, individualism—and Islamophobia.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin
Melville and the Language of Denial Melville and the Language of Denial
The events behind his story Benito Cereno are more than two centuries old, but the deceptions of racial inferiority that Melville exposes resonate today.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Toni Morrison
What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From New York City’s Last Radical Mayor What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From New York City’s Last Radical Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia also took office in a time of crisis—and he was open to new ideas and bold reforms.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / D.D. Guttenplan
Why Does Obama Want to Extend a War He Doesn’t Believe In? Why Does Obama Want to Extend a War He Doesn’t Believe In?
Obama wants another decade of war in Afghanistan—but a new book says he’s already lost faith in the mission.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / George Zornick
An Artful Imbalance An Artful Imbalance
Treme is an understated and deeply melancholic patchwork of American stubbornness.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Akiva Gottlieb
Infamy or Urn? Infamy or Urn?
How was Emily Dickinson able to be frugal and fruitful in her art?
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Pop & Circumstance Pop & Circumstance
The teenpop of the teens has proved discomfiting, like the dead brought back to life.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Joshua Clover
Wolves’ Hall Wolves’ Hall
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Destination Wedding Destination Wedding
Drunk as a persimmon on the wine of Cana or myself, I couldn’t tell— the old pain and the old dream mingled and seasickness threw kisses in shapes upon the wall like shells upon the shore outside the conch- shaped hall in whose pearled hum I danced as if my feet were small and free of gravity as sea lice. When above the palms, horns, drums and silks I heard a creature high in moss- tangled eucalyptus cry for milk— a creature not my own, yet still my milk let down. I looked up and it locked me in a stare, half-child, half-marsupial, that transfixed me on the scallop of the terraced white hotel it squatted on until sure that I had seen it dove back into the lagoon like a weasel chasing an eel ever further into the nature of oblivion.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Danielle Chapman
The Taiga The Taiga
Cold crown of the world. Boreas exhales the breath that’s preserved him all these years, kept the wolverine alive, and the spruce-blue stars keen as crystals of virgin ice clipping the pines on their northern slopes. Most coverage here is evergreen. It grows in the short day painfully slow, putting down rings, and whatever waxed needles do pitter to the ground lie there still as pickup sticks in the reckoning between two goes, as if the soft lynx left these miles on long exposure. Bison graze, moss-obsessed. Fresh snow settling confuses them with abandoned dens and boulders. A she-bear, snug in the bed of her own fur, lies under stone, four pink cubs assuming their forms faster in her womb than the carcasses that nourished them can decompose. She dreams at double speed of balsam wood, hot piss and foreign males, the planet turning imperceptibly underneath her shoulder. Honey congeals in hives suspended from conifer boughs. The yellow eyes of a Tengmalm’s owl click in the dark like camera shutters.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Frances Leviston