David Byrne is just a few years older than me, and from his early days with the band Talking Heads to his later work as an international musicologist and producer, he's been a presence in my cultural life. His new book is a personal, thoughtful odyssey across a dozen cities, places that his busy
Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950) offers intimate insight into the thinking of many of the twentieth century’s pioneering American abstract artists. The slim volume documents the salon sessions at 35 East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village on April 21–23, 1950, where the goal, as defined by
Seven-week old Nathaniel Byng doesn't seem to mind the long, bony finger poking his tummy. In fact, he's fascinated by the finger (covered almost to the knuckle with a gold and red-stone ring) and the tall, sepulchral figure leaning over him. Anyone over the age of seven weeks might wisely look at
It started with the busted tie-rods of a Humvee. It continued with the ill-advised order to split an Army Ranger platoon as the Afghan night was coming on. And it finished, on April 22, 2004, with the death by friendly fire of an exemplary young American. But there it did not really end, because
It is impossible to talk about books, nowadays; to talk about books without nostalgia creeping into the discourse; though perhaps, to speak the lingo, perhaps 'twas always so. Whether the specific tone is wistful, elegiac, defensive, hostile, or whether the talk is of an imminent and lamented end,
"I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession," Somerset Maugham once wrote, describing how his training at St. Thomas's Hospital in London presented him with "life in the raw" — the substance from which fiction writers educe their stories. Our
The bleak, rapid-fire sentences of Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s Beauty Salon give the spare novella an airless hyper-immediacy—and a terrible, unstoppable momentum. When a mysterious and incurable disease devastates an unnamed city, a lone transvestite hairdresser finds himself in the unlikely
Dan Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, starts in the middle of a particularly bloody scene: A severed hand on a bed of ice in a Styrofoam cooler is being rushed, along with its owner, to a hospital in Michigan. Chaon offers no further information; the details—teeth chattering, calluses on the
Despite their ever-present flora, it's somewhat false to call the poems in Micrographia "nature poems." While their topic may be the natural world—sumac and juniper, sparrows, lilacs, jots of fir—the book revolves on a much more ontological axis. An appreciation of nature is present throughout
Hilary Mantel explores at close quarters the world of Henry VIII
