nonfiction
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Review Essay
SPARTA, by Roxana Robinson. The unit fragments and the soldier finds himself alone, more deeply alone than he was before he enlisted, more alone than he has ever been.
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Feature
Page-Turner at The New Yorker, July 1 2014. Uncovering the story of Ted Peckham and his thriving male-escort service in 1930s New York.
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Feature
Poets & Writers, May/June 2014. With their new magazine, Scratch, Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin are busting through the last literary taboo: money.
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Book Review
THE STEADY RUNNING OF THE HOUR, by Justin Go. “The plot, with its combination of world war, doomed romance and exotic locations, seems designed to catch the attention of Hollywood producers in search of another “English Patient.”
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Interview
BARBARA EHRENREICH, author of “Living with a Wild God”. “It’s rare to come across a memoir, perhaps especially by a woman writer, that is so much more focused on a philosophical coming of age than with emotional or sexual discovery.”
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Book Review
THE SCARLET SISTERS, by Myra MacPherson. “MacPherson hammers home the point that, even in 2014, powerful men treat women’s bodies as political bargaining chips. These Victorian sisters’ blast of protest against a restrictive and hypocritical status quo remains something to celebrate.”
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Feature
THE GREAT WAR, By Joe Sacco. The panorama darkens as we move from behind-the-lines activity to the combat zone, from preparations to attack: a dark-grey wash marks nightfall, with small white patches picking out candlelit dugouts and distant explosions.
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Book Review
CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Churchwell. It is art that eases our frustrations with a plot in which the “careless” escape and the dreamers are cut down, and it is to art that we are left wanting, ceaselessly, to return.
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Feature
THE ART GENOME PROJECT. At first glance, Artsy.net looks like the minimalist homepage of a wealthy museum. But it’s what you can’t see—how the images are categorised and organised—that sets the site apart.
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Book Review
THE HEIR APPARENT, by Jane Ridley. It’s hard not to see parallels between Bertie’s fate and that of his great-great-grandson Prince Charles, now 65: to spend adult life searching for something to do while waiting for Mother to die.
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Book Review
BOOK OF AGES, by Jill Lepore. This luminous story of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister is stitched together from fragments and scraps, a life’s “remains”: literature and descendants.
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Interview
JESMYN WARD, author of “Men We Reaped.” “Part of what I’m trying to accomplish in the book is to shock people out of their complacency.”
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Feature
THE UNWINDING, by George Packer. If there is hope in these stories, it lies in the resilience of the ordinary characters Packer writes about with empathy, patience, and respect—in what he calls “the ability of people to survive in the middle of strong winds blowing.”
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Book Review
SHRAPNEL by William Wharton. Shrapnel wounds haphazardly—it can glance off the surface or lodge deep in the body. In William Wharton’s World War II memoir, it becomes a metaphor for the war’s psychic impact.
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Feature
ON MARJORIE HILLIS. “Live Alone and Like It” is a brisk and bracing self-help guide for women who, by choice or accident, find themselves “settling down to a solitary existence.”
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Feature
THE MAID’S VERSION, by Daniel Woodrell. The novel draws on a devastating event in the history of Woodrell’s small Ozarks town: the unexplained explosion of its dance hall one night in the late 1920s, which killed over 40 people.
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Interview
SHERI FINK, author of “Five Days at Memorial.” “It seemed urgent to trace what really happened, and why, so that any of us who might find ourselves in need of medical care – or be providing it – in a future disaster could learn from it.”
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Interview
REZA ASLAN, author of “Zealot.” “Whether you think he’s God or not is fine, but just looking at him as a man, you cannot help but be blown away by him. You can’t help but want to know him and to follow him.”
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Art Review
FOUR EXHIBITIONS AT SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK. Because the exhibition playfully upsets the correlation between idea and execution, between artist and artwork, it makes the whole concept of artistic fame feel suspect
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Book Review
THE LAST OF THE DOUGHBOYS, by Richard Rubin. Ten years ago, Rubin set out to ask men at the very end of their lives to describe events from the beginning.
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Book Review
HERE IS NEW YORK, by E.B. White. He is scathing about the “locust” commuters, who come in just to pick the city’s pocket — in his eyes it is the settlers, the immigrants, who give it “passion.”
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Book Review
Skepticism was limited only by a writer’s boldness. What if instead of something in the heavens, there was nothing? Without God, what might man become?
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Book Review
COLLEGE OF ONE, by Sheilah Graham. The Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who became F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover, shaped herself out of nothing much, and she knew it.
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Interview
KATE CHRISTENSEN, author of “Blue Plate Special.” “If food offers any balm, it’s the comfort of being in a world of pleasurable concreteness, one in which experience is evanescent and temporary.”
JOANNA SCUTTS 