21st century kitsch: Cultural critic W. David Marx examines the state of our art in his book Blank Space
Marx argues that the 21st century has been typified not by artistic innovation or renovation, but by a capitalistic retrenchment.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: Ulysses by James Joyce
Joyce's novel is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Fragments shored against ruins: Matthew Hollis charts the convoluted and painful path toward T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece in a new “biography” of The Waste Land
Eliot's vision of a fallen world blighted by urban decay and a somnambulant populace continues to divide readers.
Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’s classic dictator novel Mr. President has uncomfortable resonances in our modern era
Rather than a work of prototypical magic realism, El Señor Presidente is more reflective of straightforward modernism.
A portrait of the artist as a dead man: controversial proposal floated to repatriate the remains of James Joyce
Two Dublin city councillors have a plan to exhume the bones of the great modernist writer and return them to his birthplace.
Anatomy of melancholy: Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry’s third novel features two career criminals waiting at a seedy Spanish port for the arrival of the estranged daughter of one of them.
White water rafting along the stream of consciousness: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport
In its entirety, Ducks, Newburyport represents a towering fictional edifice that is as engaging and readable as it is formally ambitious.