When Poetry Was the Rage When Poetry Was the Rage
"That was a benefit shooting." So said a shaken Kenneth Koch to a stunned audience seconds after a tall, scraggly man fired a pistol at him on January 10, 1968.
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella
¡Que Viva Mexico! ¡Que Viva Mexico!
For years it was one of those intriguing asterisk marks in many a great writer's career--a book that might have been but wasn't.
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Kerr
Among the Believers Among the Believers
Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own is a deft and ambitious four-part biography interweaving the lives of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Conn...
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Vince Passaro
The Mark of Cain The Mark of Cain
Somewhere, and it's not in this new Everyman's Library edition, James M. Cain betrayed a state secret when he said that "a writer can only write two hours a day." The truth in ...
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Tolkin
Far From Heaven Far From Heaven
During the early years of the civil rights revolution, Theodore Bilbo, the ferocious segregationist senator from Mississippi, published a book titled Take Your Choice: Separati...
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Lind
The Other Iran The Other Iran
In the deformed, malignant years of the Ayatollah and the mullahs, women in Iran in the 1980s sometimes found subversive ways to mutiny against the cruelties imposed on them by...
May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gloria Emerson
What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
"Birds of America," by Lorrie Moore
May 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Shayna Cohen
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