Archive
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Articles
Staircase Over the Void
Thinking Without a Banister sounds like a freethinker’s slogan, a refusal of the supports of authority, tradition, and revealed faith. It recalls Hannah Arendt’s appreciation of Gotthold Lessing in...
Mary McCarthy’s Clarity
Catholic readers know the story cold. As a young writer, Flannery O’Connor accompanied Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick to a dinner party hosted by Mary McCarthy, a distinguished critic,...
Twin Peaks Revisited
In the fall of 1946, Mary McCarthy wrote a letter objecting to a New Yorker essay by John Hersey, which had trained its journalistic sights on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
Slouching Toward Vegas
South and West: From a Notebookby joan didionknopf, 160 pages, $21 “There is,” says Don DeLillo, “a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to...
Cocktails with the Existentialists
Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktailsby sarah bakewellother press, 448 pages, $25 More than seven decades have passed since philosophy held court on the world-historic stage, in the...
Fugitive Commitments
Search Party, a new dark comedy airing on TBS, turns a sly eye on a scene everyone loves to hate: the hip streets and haunts of gentrified Brooklyn, teeming...
Cryogenic Monks
Christianity’s waning influence in the West has not reduced our desire for apocalypse. We still look to the future expecting closure, or at least a grand finale. Jaded by...
Bayou Noir
Book critics have a way of talking about popular writers whose talent and ambition set them apart from the mass-market crowd: Such writers “transcend the genre.” A mystery writer...
