The Arts Archives - Page 8 of 37

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 ...

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

Film & Performing Arts

La Chimera‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Do the souls of the dead miss what we have taken and sold?

October 16, 2024 • by Taylor Stout

One setting in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2024 film, La Chimera, collapses two thousand years of Italian history: an Etruscan gravesite in the shadow of a power plant. Here, where polluted ocean water laps at ancient dirt, the film’s merry band of tomb raiders (tombaroli) discover an untouched tomb brimming with artifacts—most ...

La Chimera‘s Tomb Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present

Reviews

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

A review of Cue the Sun!—The Invention of Reality TV

October 15, 2024 • by Hannah Berman

Emily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer ...

Emily Nussbaum Is Getting Realer Than Real

Film & Performing Arts

Enter the Glow

Hannah Burns explores identity, escapism, and queer belonging in I Saw the TV Glow

October 9, 2024 • by Hannah Burns

Sometimes the only place we can be ourselves is inside the media we consume. Sometimes that is where we see options, where we feel less “other.” Watching I Saw the TV Glow, I loved the thought that Jane Schoenbrun’s amazing new film will join a queer film canon in which a ...

Gender

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

On making music for girls

October 9, 2024 • by Shelley Martin

When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor ...

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

Feminism

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

October 8, 2024 • by Madeleine Adams

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen

An interview with Margaret Atwood

October 2, 2024 • by Margaret Atwood and Aaron James Wendland

This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Literature

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

At 85, the author is still too quick for her critics

September 25, 2024 • by Alexander Sorondo

One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than ...