Medium Cool Medium Cool
In the film from which there is no escape and no going back, The Matrix, the writer-director team of Andy and Larry Wachowski presented a grim choice between truth and illusion...
May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Fight Club Fight Club
Writing may be fighting, as Ishmael Reed famously opined, but most writers know the difference. There are, of course, some who blur the line.
May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Adam Shatz
She’s So Heavy She’s So Heavy
In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse, her second, titled The Country Between Us.
May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Meghan O’Rourke
Sex and the City Sex and the City
From the mid to the late 1920s, the German painter Christian Schad produced a group of paintings like little else in modern art.
May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto
Magnificent Obsessions Magnificent Obsessions
This week, all true movie lovers will rush to see a violent and fantastic special-effects thriller, in which a character endowed with uncanny powers rips through the veil of il...
May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Misuses of Allegory The Misuses of Allegory
Is José Saramago an anti-Semite?
May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
The New Yorker Goes to War The New Yorker Goes to War
In its first issue after the fall of the World Trade Center, The New Yorker published a handful of short reaction pieces by John Updike, Jonathan Franzen and others about the h...
May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Lazare
Dare Call It Treason Dare Call It Treason
Few traditions are more American than freedom of speech and the right to dissent.
May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Eric Foner
We Are the Patriots We Are the Patriots
Americans who oppose the Cheney-Bush junta demonstrate sanity, not cowardice.
May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gore Vidal
Partisan Requiem Partisan Requiem
The announcement a few weeks ago that Partisan Review was closing shop after a run of nearly seventy years brought sadness--since PR at its best was a central site of American ...
May 8, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Peter Brooks