I will wear sweatshirts with bright appliqués / Of owls, and work for Head Start. Saturdays //
Will be the food bank; Sundays, church at ten. / Evenings I'll...
Arch after arch set in the brick, / Rosettes along them, pebble-thick; // Draped, helmed, armed figures, scribes with scrolls, / And eagles in their leafy holes:...
Paint. Paint the soft lines / of damp cheeks across a canvas. / Paint the deep eyes, the little / hand and the orb. / Splash some color along the curve / of her...
To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: "The Martian," with Matt Damon, and "Bridge of Spies," with Tom Hanks.
As I said, I’m a lawyer. Technically speaking, / is a head blown to pieces by a smart bomb a beheading? // Infinitely compressible, yet expandable time...
Stone's characters were human, and humans screw up; there wasn’t much to do about that except to situate the culprits in clarifying narratives of moral scrutiny.
What’s fairly new about 'Black Mass' is that this gangster story focuses more on the moral seduction and destruction of a lawman than on the downfall of a hood.
The series presents a view of medieval Catholicism as the realm of cranks and fanatics, while Thomas Cromwell is shown as distinctly rational and reasonable.
Set in bombed-out Berlin of 1945, Petzold's 'Phoenix' questions who was guilty, and of what, in the daily workings of the Holocaust—and will there be a reckoning?
The result of her years-long quest to find fellow victims of smear campaigns, Dreger's 'Galileo's Middle Finger' reveals a problem larger than political correctness.
Centered around the missing bomber pilot from 'Life After Life,' Atkinson's 'A God in Ruins' examines the interplay of real life and the life of the imagination.
Spanning almost James Agee's entire lifetime, these letters between author and his priest cover alcohol, God, poetry, childhood, and a “mouthful of sweet potato.”
In 'The End of the Tour,' James Ponsoldt addresses the life—and death—of David Foster Wallace, served as the Platonic ideal for a generation of younger writers.
Set on present day Staten Island Eddie Joyce's 'Small Mercies' traces the effect of 9/11 on the families of people living in “the servants’ quarters of New York."
At the Fifth Station of the Cross / I am asked to “accept in particular / the death that is destined for me” / Which I must keep myself from guessing...
One of Merton’s gifts as a writer was the ability to insinuate himself into the lives of those he'd never met and remain a personal presence decades after his death.
Celan’s work has prompted an often reverential critical response. But his poetry is always difficult and sometimes agonizing; reading it provides no easy pleasures.
You won't see a movie more carefully premeditated than Allen's latest, which is too much like a machine, its characters more like well-oiled gears than human beings.
The footage once used to exploit the Winehouse miseries have been carefully sequenced by director Asif Karpadia so that they bring her humanity home to the viewer.
Claudia Rankine’s 'Citizen' and Jeffery Renard Allen’s 'Song of the Shank' both take up the issue of race in America in jagged and beautiful poetry and prose.
Asleep, she has no idea she is old. // She’s running uphill, no lightfoot, but quite fast /
past the houses and driveways of family friends / toward the higher...
Laura Swan does a good job of explaining both the beguines’ spiritual practices in the context of their own times and how their continuing legacy affects us today.
Even if her new novel gives us pleasure, shouldn't we be able to remember Harper Lee as a member of one of the most unusual groupings in literary history?
Anne Enright's new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Paul Moses's history of Irish-Italian relations in 19th century New York delves into the causes for "race war" between the immigrant groups and how they overcame it.
Langdon Hammer's biography of poet and writer James Merrill is "wholly definitive" in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
If you ask me, being a writer is a little like falling in love. No matter how uncomplicated it seems at the start, it is always complicated. The trick is to persist.
Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is the perfect hero in an epic account of an earthquake that ravages California; Bill Pohlad studies Brian Wilson’s musical perfectionism.
Ireland's fiction laureate talks about sex and death in Ireland; Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to the country; Kafka and kids; and her new novel, 'The Green Road.'
Many modern American thinkers have asked, often and with anxiety, "What is man?" In his latest book, Mark Greif thinks we've outgrown this—and it's a good thing.
