Cahiers du cinéma—the magazine that launched the New Wave, made heroes of Hitchcock and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and grew into a sort of beau ideal for movie criticism—rose from the belief that mainstream moviemaking was a modern art. This wasn’t an especially new idea. The magazine’s founding editors, including André Bazin and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, were critics known already for their Hollywood affinities; Cahiers took its example from the journals they had written for. An avid cinephile who saw the first issue in 1951 would have been caught off guard less by its viewpoints (which squared nicely with those of

Like many contemporary memoirists, David Small had a lousy childhood. He was a sickly kid (illness, he explains, was “a way of expressing myself wordlessly”); his mom was cold and distant, and he once walked in on her canoodling with a local hipster lady; his dad was taciturn and mean; his grandmother was physically abusive. There was a lot of hostile silence in his house, and Small ended up contributing to it inadvertently: When he was fourteen, an operation for a cancer his parents refused to tell him about left him with only one vocal cord and no voice. (He

The Bauhaus is coming to New York. A retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art later this fall will be accompanied by an immense catalogue, detailing a dazzling array of the school’s ideas and objects. But before the onslaught of Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy, Itten, and Schlemmer, one ought to peruse this intimate volume of work and writings by Gunta Stölzl, the school’s only female master. Coeditor Monika Stadler (both editors are the artist’s daughters), in a nostalgic glance back at her childhood, calls the interwoven text and images a “picture book,” and the term is quite

John Irving always starts his stories at the end, which is why it has taken him nearly twenty years to write his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River (Random House, $28). “The ending just eluded me,” he said in late September, when he spoke to me by phone from his Vermont home. “I knew only that there was a cook and his son, in a rough kind of place, and something happens to make them fugitives.” The protagonists in this exquisitely crafted, elliptically structured novel—a gripping story that spans five decades and extends across northern New England and Ontario—are

We live in an era of food separatism. Among our factions are the locavores, the vegans, the raw foodists, and the sustainable agriculturists. We have grass-fed beef, grass-finished beef, organic produce, minimally treated produce, and people who swear by or disparage some or all of the four. We have theory after theory—scientific, political, personal—about what to eat and why. We have Top Chef and Iron Chef, and never the twain shall meet.

Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War is an important book—though it’s not for everyone. If you want a painstaking critique of Noam Chomsky or of protestors who chanted “Imperialism!” when America attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan, it offers no end of material and thoughtful argument. But general readers will find its last third off-putting. Following the author’s own penchant for witty turns of phrases, allow me this slogan: “Part of the way with Bérubé!”

If you are reading this, you almost certainly live your life as the subject of a state. This state expects you to abide by its laws, pay its taxes, and contribute in one way or another to its military adventures. You may chafe at these demands, but you know there are limits to what you can do to escape them. You are not alone in this. As political scientist James C. Scott puts it, by the nineteenth century to most people “life outside the state came to seem hopelessly utopian.”

When strolling in an old church or museum, it’s often tempting to sneak into a roped-off section or peek behind a closed door. What, after all, could be hiding from us? Perhaps nothing more than an old broom. For the past twenty-five years, Canadian photographer Robert Polidori has been going behind the scenes at the Palace of Versailles to document periods of restoration and change. The result, nearly five hundred photographs collected in three volumes, is a far more intimate and revealing scene than the curated period set tourists flock to year-round. As a stage for the modern era, Versailles