Second Glance: It by Stephen King
/As a new adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 novel It hits theaters, a critic takes another look at the novel and its underlying conflicts.
Read MoreOne Encounter: John Koch's Figure on a Bed
/In his painting "Figure on a Bed," John Koch immortalizes the kind of private moment that's usually lost in an instant - Brett Busang muses on one arresting piece of art.
Read MoreOn Reading a Five-Volume Biography of Prince Albert
/Maligned as nothing but handsome breeding stock, this German import did more to redefine the role of the monarchy than any subsequent royal, consort or king.
Read MoreOne Encounter: El Jaleo
/What good are reproductions and what do we lose in keeping them? Our writer returns to a famous painting after a dozen years and finds more than he'd imagined
Read MoreThe Master Touch: One Encounter with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII
/William Shakespeare lived under the Tudors for most of his life, but he only wrote about them once, in his play The History of the Life of King Henry VIII – or did he? In our latest One Encounter, and also the new installment in his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue takes a look at that play and the fractious theories attendant.
Read MoreOne Encounter: Eight Hours from Home
/Out of cash, out of work, bounced from his home, and lost in the world, Steve Brachmann turned to an old friend for help—W. Somerset Maugham. In this installment of our regular feature, we see how a single good book—for Steve, it was Of Human Bondage—can help right a life.
Read MoreOne Encounter: George & Me
/What do you do when the courageous trailblazing author who formed your youth is accused of an unspeakable crime? John G. Rodwan, Jr. does what Orwell would have done, weighed the evidence and let the chips fall where they may.
Read MoreOne Encounter: Thank You and Goodbye
/In February, the great pianist Alfred Brendel gave his final performance in New York City. Greg Waldmann was in Carnegie Hall to see it and in this regular feature he shares the experience.
Read MoreViolent Art: On Learning to Shudder
/In this regular feature, John Cotter examines two brutal, disturbing pieces of 20th-Century German art—and they come disturbingly close to examining him in return.
Read MoreOne Encounter: On Packing Two Bags for Mexico
/In our regular feature, Scott Esposito expands on the sublime agony of filling a suitcase with an entire year’s worth of books.
Read MoreOne Encounter: On Reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, translated from the French
/Reading a book rendered from Polish to French to English is like playing a game of Telephone. In our regular feature, Andrew Crocker expounds on the pleasures of translations.
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