Joan Acocella | The New York Review of Books

Dancing Queen

“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.”

June 10, 2023

‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

by Jennifer Homans

June 8, 2023 issue

From Russia, with Love

In her monumental new biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans tells the story of the choreographer whose modernist extension of classicism forever altered American dance.

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century

by Jennifer Homans

May 25, 2023 issue

The Red Shoes

Mikhail Baryshnikov has never played so undashing a hero.

The White Helicopter

a play by Alvis Hermanis, at the New Riga Theater, Riga, Latvia, opened November 21, 2019, with additional performances planned for 2020

May 14, 2020 issue

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master

by Nadine Meisner

December 19, 2019 issue

‘The Work of Becoming No One’

The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

July 18, 2019 issue

Adult Supervision

June 28, 2018 issue

Crotch Shots Galore

The life and choreography of Bob Fosse

Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical

by Kevin Winkler

All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical “Chicago”

by Ethan Mordden

May 24, 2018 issue

Letter

Marie Grass Amenta

Adult Supervision

June 28, 2018 issue

The F Word

Profanity “strikes a complaint against the human condition”

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

by Benjamin K. Bergen

In Praise of Profanity

by Michael Adams

February 9, 2017 issue

Mixing It Up

Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed

a musical written and directed by George C. Wolfe, with songs by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, at the Music Box Theatre, New York City, opened on April 28, 2016

June 23, 2016 issue

A Ghost Story

On ‘Brodsky/Baryshnikov’

Brodsky/Baryshnikov

a theater piece written and directed by Alvis Hermanis

January 14, 2016 issue

The Elmore Leonard Story

“All villains have mothers,” he said

Four Novels of the 1980s: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky

by Elmore Leonard, edited by Gregg Sutter

Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch

by Elmore Leonard, edited by Gregg Sutter

Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories

by Elmore Leonard

September 24, 2015 issue

The Ecstasy of a Modern Romantic

Isadora Duncan’s life and vision

May 23, 2013 issue

Pure Gold

The Golden Legend

a dance piece by Christopher Williams

August 13, 2009 issue

‘Beware of Pity’

July 13, 2006 issue

Letter

Bill Dawes

The Case of Dr. Condor

September 21, 2006 issue

Between Comedy and Horror

The Afterlife

by Donald Antrim

June 8, 2006 issue

‘A Note of the Miraculous’

Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

June 9, 2005 issue

No Bloody Toe Shoes

The Company

a film by Robert Altman, story by Neve Campbell and Barbara Turner, screenplay by Barbara Turner

February 26, 2004 issue

The Neapolitan Finger

Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity (La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano)

by Andrea de Jorio, translated and edited by Adam Kendon

December 21, 2000 issue

Secrets of Nijinsky

Nijinsky’s famous diary was the record of his thoughts as he began to go insane. To my knowledge, it is the only sustained written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.

January 14, 1999 issue