Books & the Arts

Economic Anxiety and the Gay Marriage Debate Economic Anxiety and the Gay Marriage Debate

Proposition 8, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Civil Unions? Nation Senior Editor Richard Kim and writer Reihan Salam talk it all out on Bloggingheads.tv.

Jun 24, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Bloggingheads

As Big as Mount Ararat

As Big as Mount Ararat As Big as Mount Ararat

Orhan Pamuk may be the face that Turkish literature turns to the West, but the novelist Yashar Kemal is its conscience and heart.

Jun 24, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Marc Edward Hoffman

Fragments Fragments

When dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me, I began to crawl, burning, shivering, to my uncurtained window; Migrating birds streamed over the dark sea.   Who can quench the ingenious fires of cruelty? I was dreaming of white-fetlocked horses conferring in a meadow When dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me.   On my stopped loom, a sort of landscape: icy Peaks, serrated as daggers; a corpse, and beside it a crow, And migrating birds streaming over the dark sea.   Fat, autumnal flies alight on my sheets, rainbow-hued, dizzy; This one on my wrist--its mandibles quiver, its gibbous eyes glow... Then dawn, wearing golden sandals, awoke me.   Merciless daughter of Zeus, immortal Aphrodite, Come to me, sing to me, low-voiced, in sorrow Of migrating birds that stream over the dark sea.   Cast aside your spangled headband: in my mirror I see You beneath these stringy locks, puckered lips, and tearstained cheeks... go, Migrating birds, stream over the dark sea; And dawn, wearing golden sandals, awake me.

Jun 24, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Mark Ford

Bierced

Bierced Bierced

Ours is an age of the unexpected, the extraordinary—the uncanny. What better time to resurrect the stories of Ambrose Bierce?

Jun 24, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Victor LaValle

Cornered

Cornered Cornered

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 12th & Delaware; Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's Restrepo; Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me; Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Al...

Jun 23, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

The Everyday Oblique The Everyday Oblique

How and why do we use things like codes, jokes and slang to mask our meanings?

Jun 22, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko

Ardor and the Abyss

Ardor and the Abyss Ardor and the Abyss

Emily Dickinson's reclusiveness was a way of protecting the world from herself.

Jun 16, 2010 / Books & the Arts / James Longenbach

Retreat to Subsistence Retreat to Subsistence

Could the introduction of genetically modified genes into Mexico's landrace corns lead to their extinction?

Jun 16, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Peter Canby

Shelf Life Shelf Life

Gabriel García Márquez's Clandestine in Chile; Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget; Roger Lowenstein's The End of Wall Street

Jun 16, 2010 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella

The Obama Presidency: Possibility or Peril? The Obama Presidency: Possibility or Peril?

A progressive moment was supposed to follow Obama's election. Robert Kuttner's A Presidency in Peril asks where it went.

Jun 14, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Ari Berman

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