Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure. But like a great many sonnets — most famously the 154 written by William Shakespeare … Read more
Rural life anchors a number of our recommended titles this week, from Charlotte Wood’s lovely novel set at a remote Australian convent to Bob Johnson’s Indiana short stories, and from Lyndal Roper’s history of peasant revolution to Callan Wink’s novel of brothers scratching for sustenance in rural Montana. Elsewhere, we also recommend a biography of … Read more
Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his … Read more
Ordinarily, the actor-writer-musician Todd Almond is a pretty unflappable stage presence. But normal rules do not apply when you discover at intermission that Bob Dylan is in the audience of the performance you’re giving of a musical that’s saturated with his songs — and your harmonica solo is coming up. “I don’t know if you’ve … Read more
Romance tropes tend to spark debate. Does “enemies to lovers” normalize bullying? Is “fake dating” overused? What’s hotter, “brother’s best friend” or “oops, there’s only one bed”? As a romance author, I try not to pick favorites. But as a reader, I will boldly claim “second-chance romance” as the elite trope. There’s just something so … Read more
Donald Shoup, a professor of urban studies whose provocative and occasionally amusing 734-page treatise on the economics of parking sparked reforms in thousands of cities, helping reduce traffic, create green space and make cities more walkable, died on Feb. 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. The cause was a stroke, his … Read more
Mr. Stern’s life was as colorful, confusing and sometimes chaotic as his art. He was born Gerd Jacob Stern in Oct. 12, 1928, to a Jewish family in the Saar, a German-speaking region administered by France and Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. After the Saar was incorporated into Nazi Germany in … Read more
Our “Read Your Way Around the World” series has brought readers book recommendations from writers in Paris, Cairo, Seoul, Buenos Aires and 40 other literary destinations. And at every step of the way, readers have responded — arguing for their favorite books in the comments sections, debating with each other and often surprising us with … Read more
THE REVOLUTIONARY SELF: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800, by Lynn Hunt “Over the course of the 1700s,” Lynn Hunt writes in the opening of “The Revolutionary Self,” her study of the rise of modern individualism, “people in Europe and British North America came to have a happier view of human … Read more
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | How to Listen One day, several decades ago, the writer Winnie Holzman was shopping in a Manhattan bookstore where a particular cover caught her eye. It showed a woman with a green face, a black hat pulled down over her eyes. The book was “Wicked” by Gregory … Read more