You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be transformed into a nursery for a baby due next month. Your late...
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen. Many readers addressed their fan letters not to the author, Betty Smith, but to her main character,...
The text that weighed on him at the time of his arrival to Turkey was his novel “Another Country,” then unfinished. The turbulence of civil-rights America, too. Baldwin is said to have come to the residence of Engin...
If your New Year’s resolution is to stop obsessively reading post-election analyses, then perhaps you would welcome another way of understanding these United States. What do Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have in...
In the early months of 1973, the band that dared to call itself Big Star was anything but. The album of glittering, tightly orchestrated guitar rock they had released the previous year—titled “#1 Record,” both as a gag...
Robert Eggers’s remake of the German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic, “Nosferatu,” may be presumptuous, but it’s not cynical. Murnau’s film, a silent, is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—an unauthorized one, which led to a...
December’s so dramatic. For weeks, the days darken—a quickening fade that suggests a coming show. It’s depressing to leave home around four-thirty and realize the sun’s already set. But the darkness has its clarifying benefits. One of my...
The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also made their way through many other books—novels they had missed upon publication,...
Can the art of opera ever escape the suffocating grip of its magnificent past? Judging from the striking array of contemporary works that reached American stages in the past year, we might be closer to that goal than...
Those of us in the admittedly absurd position of eating for a living come to learn, after some time on the job, that, on balance, most food tends to be pretty good. Of the hundreds of restaurant dishes...
