Christopher Carroll

Far from the Realm of the Real

Lafcadio Hearn’s work was marked by a hatred of modern industrial life and a fascination with what he called “survivals”—traditions or folktales that he hoped would provide a living link to a more ancient form of narrative.

Love, It’s What Makes ‘Suburra’

The surprising and ultimately tragic intimacy that develops between its principal characters stands out as one of Suburra’s great pleasures, setting it apart from the plodding, grisly portentousness of contemporary prestige crime dramas such as Narcos.

The Piano Ain’t Got No Wrong Notes

Marseus's Land of Snakes

Otto Marseus van Schrieck kept a menagerie of reptiles, insects, and vermin for the purposes of the peculiar genre of painting he had invented: sottobosco, the forest-floor still life. His wife later claimed that he spent so much time handling the snakes that they eventually began posing for him.

When Boulez Went Electric

Répons may not have provided the kind of roadmap for the evolution of electronics in music that Pierre Boulez once hinted at it, but it makes an urgent case for the importance of live performance.

The Wit of Virgil Thomson

The Knight Errant of Music Criticism

Virgil Thomson’s remarkable life in writing

The Mellow Agility of Clifford Brown

Clifford Brown was only twenty-five years old when he died, but even then was already known as one of the greatest trumpet players in jazz.

How the Greeks Got There

A striking collection of illustrated Renaissance manuscripts manages at once to suggest not just what ancient maps may have looked like, but how ancient geography influenced modern notions of topography and geography.

Arguing Over Jesus

For all of the controversy surrounding Reza Aslan and his book Zealot, the work follows in a long tradition of study of the historical figure of Jesus—a subject that has provoked vigorous debate in The New York Review’s pages over the decades.

Mingus: Chaos & Magic

Charles Mingus’s audiences never knew quite what they were going to get, and this kept them coming.

The Sound of Sonny Rollins

The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins

In spite of his advanced age, Sonny Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers. He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop, to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience playing with almost every major figure in jazz.

The Unbearable Truth of War

Simone Weil once wrote that “nothing of all that the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem to have appeared among them.” She was referring to the *Iliad*, and, judging by the recent raft of translations, adaptations, and novelizations of the poem, we would seem to agree. Four new English versions, all published within a few months of each other, enter a market already glutted with Iliads, many of them—like Richmond Lattimore’s recently reissued classic 1951 translation and Robert Fagles’s widely used 1991 rendering—still vital. Now, the New York Theatre Workshop has staged *An Iliad* (up through April 1), a play that compresses the entire epic into a one-man, hundred-minute performance.