Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is the talk of the town, but does it have anything to say?
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28.
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach
In two days, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux will publish Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen whose last book, The Corrections, made just [...]

In his latest novel, Michael Cunningham writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. But he goes beyond that, anchoring his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, [...]

The death of Abbey Lincoln on Saturday August 14, just a week after her 80th birthday, rewound my audio memory to 1959.

By Steve Elman
I didn’t have to re-listen to “Lost in the Stars,” from her Riverside album Abbey is Blue. I can replay that performance any time I wish, just by thinking about it.
Abbey [...]

Shakespeare’s late romance, with its catastrophic opening capped by a supernatural-tinged happy ending, is not for those who like their tragedies undiluted.
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kevin G. Coleman. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 5.
Reviewed by Susan Miron
The Winter’s Tale is one of [...]

Shakespeare’s tragic characters, on the other hand, suffer from the Christian sin of pride: knowing you aren’t God, but trying to become Him—a sin of which any of us is capable. — W. H. Auden on Othello in Lectures on Shakespeare
Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at [...]

If you want to know what’s for dinner in the Middle East or Africa, look no further than this marvelous book. Here a Persian dish of eggplant with saffron and yogurt, there a Ghanaian soup of chicken and ground nuts scooped up with a dumpling called fufu, there a Lebanese stuffed grape leaf from Arnold [...]

Papercut’s mission is to collect, catalog, and make available to the public the widest possible collection of contemporary ‘zines.

By Dylan Rose
I’m new at this reporting bit and, in an early conversation with my editor about the particular goals and restrictions of the genre, I blundered: I happened to refer to Arts Fuse as a “ [...]

By Helen Epstein
After the Revolution by Amy Herzog. Directed by Carolyn Cantor. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA, July 21 through August 1 (closed).
Long before the invention of psychotherapy, long before writer William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” the Greeks mined family history for its [...]

By Bill Marx
In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes.
The most recent pieces posted on [...]

By Roberta Silman
Although all the statistical material about the demography of Wordfest has yet to be compiled, the word is out that this newest event at The Mount was an amazing success. About 500 people attended events at the grounds of The Mount and nearby at Seven Hills (the fundraising dinner) over the weekend [...]