more stories

Inside the meltdown

Feature | Literature
2009-11-15

TWO leading financial journalists have made worthy additions to the increasingly crowded shelf of books on our recent economic failure. In very different ways, John Cassidy and Andrew Ross Sorkin address the critical...

---

Dealing a flush on America's top game

Feature | Literature
2009-11-15

RICHARD Nixon played poker well. His winnings in the Navy (there is no evidence that they were stowed in a specially built footlocker with a false bottom) financed young Nixon's first, successful Congressional election...

---

Auster at his best with 'Invisible'

Feature | Literature
2009-11-15

AS soon as you finish Paul Auster's "Invisible" you want to read it again. And not because, as sometimes with his novels - as with the novels of Georges Perec, one of a handful of other real authors mentioned in the...

---

Highs and lows on deadly K2

Feature | Literature
2009-11-8

K2 is no Mount Everest. It's some 700 feet shorter - and a lot more deadly. Located in the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan, K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world, clocks in at 28,251 feet. Unlike at Everest,...

---

The people's favorite

Feature | Literature
2009-11-8

SHORTLY after the British Army's rousing triumph over Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein in November 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned his countrymen to avoid over-confidence. "Now this is not...

---

'Lacuna' chock-full of resonating truths

Feature | Literature
2009-11-8

A skinny young boy holds his breath and dives into the mouth of an underwater cave - a lacuna - swimming toward pale blue light as his lungs scream for oxygen. He emerges, gasping, in a ghostly cenote, a sinkhole...

---

In defence of wine's tradition

Feature | Literature
2009-10-18

FOR the last three decades, I have enjoyed the better part of an interesting bottle of wine with nearly every dinner and many a lunch. I know my vintages and rarely mistake a Burgundy for a Bordeaux. In short, I am...

---

Born to play piano

Feature | Literature
2009-10-18

DURING the first half of his junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects....

---

Achilles' anger and its cosmic overtones

Feature | Literature
2009-10-18

JUST how angry was Achilles, the best of the Achaean warriors at the siege of Troy, whose rage against his commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, sets off the calamitous events described in the "Iliad?" So angry that the Homeric...

---

Magic of one game

Feature | Literature
2009-10-11

THERE is no more intense and important rivalry in sport than the one between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Just ask the players, present and former; the fans of each team, so eager to characterize themselves...

---

Premise doesn't sustain book

Feature | Literature
2009-10-11

BETWEEN 1999 and 2003, John Gilkey used dozens of credit card numbers acquired from his department store job to steal more than US$100,000 worth of rare books before being caught and sent to jail, partly through the...

---

Slick and fast shorts

Feature | Literature
2009-10-11

LYDIA Millet's stories uniformly begin with arresting lines, all of them guns on the wall, waiting to go off. "When a bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised." "The dog was serious, always had been." "I...

---

Distant journeys with my bicycle

Feature | Literature
2009-9-27

"DAVID Byrne: singer, artist, composer, director, Talking Head." I'm quoting the bartender Moe Szyslak from "The Simpsons" here, from an episode in which Byrne appeared. One could also add photographer, author,...

---

Glories of 1930s' art

Feature | Literature
2009-9-27

DANCING in the Dark" is old-school cultural history, with a whiff of Matthew Arnold and the best that has been thought and said. Author Morris Dickstein, a professor at the City University of New York, has organized...

---

Juggling creativity and life as an artist

Feature | Literature
2009-9-27

I wouldn't say "How to Paint a Dead Man" is bigoted but it does traffic so heavily in troublesome stereotypes that they can't be disregarded. The book explores the lives of four artists, two British and two Italian,...