From the Archives: A Voyeur in the Archives
/"Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers…their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has balls.” This and other gleanings from a trip to the David Foster Wallace archives.
Read MoreAloof in Ceasar’s Empire
/In Soviet Russia, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities, but memorized by ordinary people. In the capitalist West, he was feted by the authorities, but ignored by ordinary people. Perhaps it's just as well he thought reality "nonsense or a nuisance."
Read MoreEverything United In Her
/It's a comfortable truism that the novels of Jane Austen are all things to all readers. But ... a life-instruction manual? From the OLM Archives, a review of A Jane Austen Education
Read MoreA Raging Appetite
/Food writing today requires guts - often quite literally. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir transcends gross-out theatrics to portray a life in food, from abandonment to something like fulfillment.
Read MoreA Visit from the Prince
/You think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble... Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham's paradoxical novel "By Nightfall".
Read MoreArt Beneath the Floorboards
/Dostoevsky's moody, brilliant "Notes from the Underground" was recently given an edgy, provocative theater treatment. Can Russia's most unfilmable writer be acted on the stage?
Read MoreWhen the Whole Story Isn't Enough
/When Peter Stein adapted Dostoevsky’s The Demons for the stage, he found himself unable to cut a single scene of its 800 pages. The result: a marathon 12-hour production.
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