For those of us who came of age in the shadow of the Cold War, popular culture as much as actual events affected perceptions of the frayed relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. By the 1980s, judging from the music...
Gogol’s play sounds strangely familiar, as if art and life were indistinguishable from each other. Two performances seem to be taking place in parallel: one inside the theater and another one in the streets outside, where soldiers in green...
The Sons of Cain were gone. The Sons of Cain didn’t exist anymore. I watched the detachment go up in an IED south of Ramadi, our five-ton Humvees leaping in the air, the taste of metal on the back of my tongue.
Joseph Brodsky—the Joseph addressed in the epigraph—once said that when you hear Derek Walcott’s voice, “the world unravels.” It is a voice concomitant with the sea, and by connection, history.
Is there such a thing as an easy situation with William Faulkner? His name is synonymous with complexity. It pervades his style, his storylines, and the format of his novels. Interacting with the public, the man obfuscated, exaggerated, and...
