A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism. Emily Raboteau told the story in our Winter 2014 magazine.
It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.
Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...
Rich championed just about every major liberal social cause of our time—human rights, gay rights, feminism, and environmental reform. Sometimes Later Poems: Selected and New,1971–2012 reads like a diary of them.
Once, more than half a century ago, he was the handsomest man in the world. A radiant man. It was a matter of bearing, of voice and gesture and timing. He had that high, buttery baritone, nothing special really, except, he says, “I knew how...
Wolitzer’s nine novels for adults all explore, in some combination, modern womanhood, family, relationships, and creativity—subjects with which she is intimately familiar as a woman, wife, mother, novelist, and daughter of a novelist.
Hockney’s entire production over the three decades since 1982 has been shadowed by death and in many ways can be seen as a direct response to all of that dying—a defiant celebration of life (“Love life!”) in the face of annihilation, the...
“The most important thing of course in his childhood was the loss of his fingers when he was thirteen.” My friend David is telling me about his father, Percy Yutar. We’re sitting in a sunny apartment in the neighborhood of Tamboerskloof...
The trick in producing a spiritual memoir spurred by disease is circumventing the fact that you have become a cliché: Of course you discovered or rediscovered your god during a grievous bout with cancer—doesn’t everyone?
