Claire Messud

Alison Lurie (1926–2020)

The late novelist and critic was a brilliant deflator of pretension and a compassionate friend.

The Dream of Pure Expression

A new translation of Paul Valéry’s poems also includes rousing extracts from his extraordinary notebooks.

The Art of Crossing Borders

Three exhibitions—one recent, two current—have foregrounded art that addresses perhaps the most pressing moral concern of our times: migration.

At the Border of the Novel

Valeria Luiselli’s ‘Lost Children Archive’

The Tender Nostalgia of ‘Cold War’

The opening scenes of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War offer the most exhilarating film-making I’ve seen in a long while.

Wilder and Wilder

‘Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder’ by Caroline Fraser

German Art, Out of the Rubble

The war, Nazi crimes, and their legacy inevitably prejudiced Americans against German art and prompted curators and museum directors to reject proposals for exhibitions. “Inventur,” an exhibition of German art from 1943 to 1955, literally means “stocktaking.”

Matisse: The Joy of Things

Matisse, unsurprisingly, had strong feelings about the objects of his daily life. They delighted, inspired, or confounded him, in their humble ordinariness and in all that they evoked.

Fierce, She Got Outside the Moment

Rachel Cusk’s ‘Transit’

Carmen Herrera's Genius

Only in the last decade has Carmen Herrera, now 101 years old, been granted the attention she should by rights have received half a century ago. The current glorious exhibition of her work at the Whitney Museum endeavors to rectify the American art world’s long-term neglect.

The Dancer & the Dance

Zadie Smith’s ‘Swing Time’

The Soul of Alice Neel

Over thirty years after her death, Alice Neel’s oeuvre attracts only ever greater interest, and seems only ever more relevant.

Revealing an Unknown Cairo

What Yasmine El Rashidi attempts in her deceptively quiet, adamantine novel Chronicle of a Last Summer is no less than to suffuse the present with the past.

The Brother of the ‘Stranger’

Discovery, Bewilderment, Joy

A New ‘L’Étranger’

An excellent and, in important ways, new version of Camus’s famous novel

Camus & Algeria: The Moral Question

Albert Camus’s ‘Algerian Chronicles’

Germany: Surviving the Whispers

‘Thank God You’ll Never Be Beautiful’

The Elephant in the Room