In many ways, Edith Halpert embodied the spirit of American pragmatism, which is how she explained herself: “I either had to stagnate, which was a thing I dreaded, or go ahead, and the only way to go ahead was to do something beyond what I...
I met Susan Sontag only once; it was after a dramatic reading of a translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, which I went to hear with a group of friends in 1994....
Going back to his early line drawings, you can see that Sendak liked to populate the world with Sendaks....
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018, 138 pp, $15.31 [divider] Amos Oz’s modest new book of nonfiction is a container for some somber thoughts and for scraps left over from earlier lectures and books—refined and re-sorted, though ultimately not completely resolved. The...
Dara Horn’s new novel, Eternal Life, imagines two characters who have made a sacred pact that consigns them to lives that will never end. Tethered to wearying and repetitive perpetuity, they cannot encounter the crossover from purpose to purposelessness that my mother-in-law experienced. ...
The earliest comedy I remember with any clarity was created by a famous tragic clown, a circus performer whose painted mouth was perpetually turned down in a frown. Left out of the spotlight, he carried a sledgehammer and ran after the other clowns who wouldn’t...
The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen // Alfred A. Knopf // 2015, pp. 320, $27.95...