Short story collections are tricky beasts, mixing many lives in a unifying style, be the tone wry, solemn, anxious, or deadpan. In this, her second collection after The Circles I Move In, Lefer might be narrating a museum’s audiotape,... Read More

A magazine ad campaign once ran the following: “Bill Shakespeare, screenwriter. Discuss.” If that is the question, then Shakespeare in the Movies is the answer. An informed, lively commentary on all films using Shakespeare’s plays... Read More

Though a “Closed for Renovation” sign will turn away tourists and art lovers from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s home in the Old Patent Office Building for the next three years, its collection will not go unattended. For... Read More

If English Romantic poets still dominate the landscape of modern poetry, it is because theirs was the first to dramatize the mind’s interior act of self-creation, of the imagination being self-consciously born into language. They were... Read More

Perhaps real-life spies, whose aliases and fictional facades camouflage their inner lives, are themselves the unconscious novelists of our time, distilling from their actions a purer purpose, a more humane plot. Harry Gold, in real life,... Read More

“Why is most contemporary poetry so dull? It is a measure of the author’s generosity that when this challenge is issued—midway into a collection of essays and reviews of modern poetry—it seems less like a firebomb lobbed at the... Read More

The Millers of these twenty tales belong to Jesse Miller, fiftyish, Jewish, husband, adulterer, academic, writer, son and lover, a sardonic, voluble witness to his own life. Told in brief, interconnected stories, the novel traces... Read More

Posthumous publication, even posthumous praise, is bittersweet vindication and at the least a cautionary tale of nearsighted commercial aims. In the mid 1930s, Arnow, a young Kentucky writer being groomed to be a distaff rival to John... Read More