Grand Affiliations
/Metaphor: a tool for poets and rhetoricians, but also, perhaps, the way that people connect to the world at large. Lianne Habinek reviews a gamesome new study by the great literary critic Denis Donoghue.
Read MoreA Question, an Answer, and a Death
/Cinema lore has it that Jean-Luc Godard read only the first and last three pages of King Lear before making his film adaptation. Lianne Habinek suggests this may have helped him get at the play's essence.
Read More"Did you en-joy the de-mon-stra-tion?"
/Boilerplate traveled the world at the turn of the twentieth century in attempt to dissuade humans from their many wars. Finally, his biography (can such things be?) is revealed, and Lianne Habinek reveals its astonishing contents
Read MoreMystery Balls
/Flotsam and jetsam clutter Javier Calvo’s novel Wonderful World, but do they choke its flow? Lianne Habinek, our steadfast guide, charts its course.
Read MoreThe Crowing of Corncrakes
/The Decemberists seem benign enough, but their songs are blood-dimmed with rape, drownings, and even cannibalism. The body count rises on their new release The Hazards of Love, but Lianne Habinek also discovers fresh wellsprings of feeling.
Read MoreMessage in a Klein Bottle
/Celebrated young novelist Jesse Ball’s latest, The Way through Doors, twists and pulls at the nature of narrative itself. Lianne Habinek threads the labyrinth.
Read MoreWho Moved My Charioteer?
/In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer tries to anatomize the choosing brain. Lianne Habinek – with an assist from some guy named Plato – anatomizes the anatomizer.
Read MoreFinely Woven Webs
/Poetry meets anatomy when Lianne Habinek reads Donne, who, in “The Flea” and other poems, aimed to discover the seat of the soul
Read MoreIs There a Doctor in the House?
/Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.
Read MoreThe Wordiness of the Long-Distance Runner
/While confabulating postmodern fictions, Haruki Murakami has also been running – first to stay fit, then at grueling length. Contributing editor Lianne Habinek jogs us through his book on the subject, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.
Read MoreWeathering
/Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies returns to the scene of the crimes of his debut Safelight, the soul-scarring world of Harlem paramedics. Lianne Habinek rides along through these dark alleys and shows us how Burke achieves dramatic power without dipping into sentimentality.
Read MoreBeautiful Corpses
/In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.
Read MoreWeirder Than Real: The Films of Michel Gondry
/Lianne Habinek forges into the beguiling part-adult, part-childish, part-real, part-dreamlike films of Michel Gondry.
Read MoreLost in the Verisylum
/Lianne Habinek maps the postmodern mazes of Jesse Ball’s maddening, memorable debut novel Samedi the Deafness.
Read MoreLab v. Library
/Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist attempts to reconcile the ageless turf war between the arts and sciences, but, as Lianne Habinek reports, Lehrer’s propositions may leave both sides feelings shortchanged.
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