The Arts Archives - Page 6 of 36

Literature

A Termination

An excerpt from A Termination by Honor Moore: a memoir about choice, loss, and identity

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore

He bends to look in.It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.Are you sure?Yes. ...

Health care

Her Choice

Honor Moore discusses the decision that shaped her life as a woman and a writer

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore and Elide Vincenti

In 1969, Honor Moore was a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama when she made the profound decision to end an unintended pregnancy—an experience that would shape her life and work. In her memoir A Termination (Public Space Books), Moore reflects on this pivotal moment while embarking on ...

Capitalism

Reconstructing Capital

The politics of translating Marx

December 6, 2024 • by Gant Roberson and William Clare Roberts

Gant Roberson interviews William Clare Roberts about the evolving relevance of Marxist theory with the latest translation of Capital. ...

Activism

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

December 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you. Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...

Film

A Monk Without a Monastery

The paradigm shift of a single shot in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days

December 2, 2024 • by Daniel Kopp and Nicholas Johnston

In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck ...

Film & Performing Arts

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

A review of Attack on Titan: The Musical

November 26, 2024 • by Abha Deshmukh

Sitting in a mezzanine seat at the New York City Center, I was startled by a Colossal Titan coming to eat me. But I relaxed when Survey Corps soldiers came spinning and flying on their mobility gear to slice the Titan’s neck which is, after all, the proper way to ...

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

Art & Design

Where the Avant-Garde Went to Grow

Behind the scenes of Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923

November 26, 2024 • by Michael Inman and Mary Karmelek

We have really rich, deep collections of materials related to Greenwich Village, especially dealing with this period of the Village's history. When the wider public thinks of Bohemias or avant-garde settings, especially from that time period, the early twentieth century, their thoughts might gravitate towards Paris in the 1920s, or ...

Feminism

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

November 25, 2024 • by Chiara Bottici

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...

Literature

Stranger Than Fiction

An excerpt introducing “a story of translation in the largest sense”

November 22, 2024 • by Edwin Frank

This book began over the kitchen sink a long time ago. I was doing the dishes after dinner. A CD of Radiohead’s album Kid A was playing, which got me thinking about a recently published book, The Rest Is Noise, by the classical music critic (and Radiohead fan) Alex Ross. ...

History

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

“An exploding form in an exploding world”

November 22, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Edwin Frank

In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of New York Review Books Classics, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and ...

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

Music

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

November 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing. This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...

Art & Design

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

A celebrated young critic hungry for more than our contemporary culture typically offers

October 17, 2024 • by Emma Minor

Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The ...