“The Desire for Motion”: Tagore’s Three Voices
/Prince of the Bengali renaissance, internationally feted poet, composer, painter, educator -- why don't we know Rabindranath Tagore today? And will a new book open our eyes?
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The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Prince of the Bengali renaissance, internationally feted poet, composer, painter, educator -- why don't we know Rabindranath Tagore today? And will a new book open our eyes?
Read MoreHis own life was the great tragedy he was never quite able to write. Michael Adams assesses the career of playwright Terence Rattigan.
Read More"I made no particular effort to keep the portrait of Byron consistent from one novel to another. I wanted to show him in different lights, from different angles." Joshua Lustig interviews the author of the esteemed Byron Trilogy.
Read MoreDoes marriage mean much anymore? Does the novel? Jeffrey Eugenides sets out to reinvent the classic literary story—but can he combine the style and the substance of the greats he hopes to update to our times?
Read MoreA meticulously-researched rendition of the horrifying massacres that comprised the "Rape of Nanjing" is the backdrop for Ha Jin's latest telegraphic and affecting novel.
Read MoreUmberto Eco's potboiling new novel The Prague Cemetery was denounced in Europe for anti-Semitism, and then went on to become a best-seller. Is the controversy valid? What strange creation has Eco brought forth?
Read MoreIn Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child the renown of a minor English poet balloons and distorts in each succeeding decade after his death
Read MoreNovelist António Lobo Antunes' books are searing and wildly original indictments of Portugal's needlessly protracted and bloody colonization of Angola.
Read MoreBen Lerner's arresting first novel sets a funhouse mirror before the author's own formative years as a poet, poseur, and pill-popper in Madrid.
Read MoreEleven years after her breakout novel The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt returns to satirize the chattering nonsense of the corporate world.
Read MoreColonialism, feminism, witchcraft, the Lord of Darkness — themes such as these once made Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels bestsellers. Now her charmingly subversive fiction is back in print.
Read MoreNicholson Baker's provocative new book is an attempt at mainstream literary pornography, but does it suffer from the same performance anxiety as other novelistic efforts to depict sex?
Read MoreOne of the most significant voices of the Harlem Renaissance was Jessie Redmon Fauset -- novelist, essayist, translator, and editor. She's become obscured behind many of the male writers she published, but Joanna Scutts returns her poignant work to the main stage
Read MoreNewly released in paperback are three Young Adult novels aimed at that sometimes-elusive reading demographic: teen boys.
Read MoreThe larger-than-life exploits of Lord Byron drew an erratic and daunting trajectory through the lives of those nearest him. A trilogy of novels attempts to go where so many biographies have gone before.
Read MoreIrmgard Keun depicted exceptionally naive women and seemed even to play the the role herself, even suing The Gestapo for banning her books. But was there a strategy behind playing dumb?
Read MoreA witty young woman meets a devastating man -- literally, he devastates her. From the wreck of her life she tells her tale, and it is a tale well told. Sex meets death in Deborah Kay Davies' brilliant True Things About Me
Read MoreVladimir Sorokin's gruesome (and frequently censored) satires puncture Russia's surprising nostalgia for the glory days of Stalin and Khrushchev; Amelia Glaser reviews two newly released works.
Read MoreThe self is strange and divided in Jenny Boully's new book of poetry; Karen Hannah tries to piece it together.
Read MoreVisionary novelist J.G. Ballard's penultimate book "Millennium People," about an outbreak of middle-class revolution and terrorism, has finally been published in the U.S.
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