Books and Ideas

An Arab Surrealist An Arab Surrealist

The Springs of Adonis (now also known as the River Ibrahim) run through the Byblos region of Lebanon down through steep gorges to the Mediterranean.

Dec 16, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Robert Irwin

The Illusion of Inclusion The Illusion of Inclusion

In 1958 John Ashbery sailed for Paris to gather materials for a thesis he intended to write about Raymond Roussel, who at the time was an all-but-forgotten French poet, playwrigh...

Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella

The Other Africans The Other Africans

When V.S.

Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Leela Jacinto

Is That All There Is? Is That All There Is?

It's hard to resist the misery of V.S. Naipaul's late fiction, hard not to surrender to its bleak and wary authority.

Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood

Subcontinental Homesick Blues Subcontinental Homesick Blues

Nearly twenty years ago, in a village in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, a young woman called Roop Kanwar was burned to death at her husband's funeral pyre.

Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Siddhartha Deb

Operation Self-Destruction Operation Self-Destruction

This article, from the August 26, 1968, issue of The Nation, is a special selection from The Nation Digital Archive. If you want to read everything The Nation has ever published on...

Dec 8, 2004 / Feature / Karl M. Purnell

What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

I've never had a strong appetite for travel literature.

Dec 7, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stacy Torres

False Promises False Promises

In American Dream, his masterful new book about welfare reform, Jason DeParle brings together two groups of people who rarely seem to meet: welfare policy-makers and welfare reci...

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan

Body Heat Body Heat

After the Kinsey Report but before the first Penthouse Forum, John Updike wrote, "He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs.

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Mark Lotto

The War That Never Was The War That Never Was

As war threatened Europe in the 1930s, a physicist turned to a psychiatrist to help understand the impending violence.

Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Russell Jacoby

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