Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be Read More
In some contexts, the good, decent humanist approach seems more callous than sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s how A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and nothing if not a good, decent humanist, defines his objective in Among the Dead Cities: “[D]id the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of Read More
In some contexts, the good, decent humanist approach seems more callous than sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s how A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and nothing if not a good, decent humanist, defines his objective in Among the Dead Cities: “[D]id the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of Read More
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Houghton Mifflin, 326 pages, $24.95.
Well-he’s brave. Or maybe just foolhardy. Jonathan Safran Foer has attacked head-on the problem of how to follow up on the best-selling Everything Is Illuminated (2002), his quirky, endearing, Holocaust-haunted debut. He’s now aimed his wit, charm and considerable Read More
There are artists whose lives are more compelling than their art, and the Brazilian painter Lasar Segall (1891-1957)–now the subject of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum–is certainly one of them. Segall, whose sensibility remained that of a northern European Expressionist even in sunny Brazil, was born to an Orthodox Jewish family, one of eight Read More
