Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go? Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go?
Exile is the best school of dialectics. --Bertolt Brecht Peter Gay emigrated from Germany when he was a teenager and work...
Jan 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Paul Reitter
Three Poems Three Poems
* Zero built a nest In my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too-- From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its ow...
Jan 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Fanny Howe
The Hollywood Three The Hollywood Three
When The Majestic was about to be released--it's the movie, you will recall, in which Jim Carrey plays a blacklisted screenwriter who suffers from amnesia--someone asked me to to...
Jan 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of $10,000, awarded annually for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States by an American, is administered mutually by th...
Jan 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ann Lauterbach
Not All, Only a Few Return Not All, Only a Few Return
(after Ghalib) Just a few return from dust, disguised as roses. What hopes the earth forever covers, what faces? I too could recall moonlit roofs, those nigh...
Jan 10, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Agha Shahid Ali
‘The Light for the Heart’ ‘The Light for the Heart’
The first Arabic music I heard was in its native habitat, while riding on gaudily painted buses through Turkey, Morocco and Syria in the 1960s. Before the drivers thrashed their ...
Jan 10, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jim Motavalli
In the Year of Harry Potter, Enter the Dragon In the Year of Harry Potter, Enter the Dragon
Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin's magical world of islands and archipelagoes, is going through a period of intense, uncomfortable social change. The old ways no longer work and the new ...
Jan 10, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Meredith Tax
Missile Shield or Holy Grail? Missile Shield or Holy Grail?
Nike-Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, Safeguard, Star Wars, X-ray lasers, spaced-based neutron particle beams, Brilliant Pebbles, Ground-Based Midcourse National Missile Defense, Midcours...
Jan 10, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Walter C. Uhler
Don’t Call It Night Don’t Call It Night
In the United States the writer tends to become an entrepreneur, competing with other literary vendors marketing their characters and language, their humor or drama, to a skeptic...
Jan 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Morris Dickstein
Plumping for Pinochet Plumping for Pinochet
Why in 1973 did Chile's democracy, long considered the crown jewel of Latin America, turn into Augusto Pinochet's murderous regime? Why did the United States, which helped Pinoch...
Jan 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin