Essays

From the 17th Floor: Cuttings

1.

We know that they are coming, but we don’t know when. The glass is smeared with brown dust, and some have complained. We may have been among the complainers.

The first sign is the hand mop dropped down from a higher floor. Dangles there, on the other side of the window pane, like a body part. Next a bucket tilted with supplies—more cloths, squeegees—and a cluster of bottles filled with fluid heavily knocking each other.

From the 17th Floor: Cuttings
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From the Stone House: Blow Wind

A few minutes’ walk from our village—down one hill and up another—is an old convent that’s been converted into an albergo, a rustic inn.   Its name is Giardino della Luna, or Garden of the Moon—an oblique reference to Lunigiana, this hill-and-dale region at the northern tip of Tuscany, which is studded with little medieval villages and their churches, convents, and castles. 

From the Stone House: Blow Wind
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Reading Place: Just Looking

By HANNAH GERSEN

 

Although I usually use this column to highlight exemplary writing about place, this month I’d like to bring attention to some of the many beautiful photo essays I’ve stumbled across in the past few months. With the popularity of slide shows on the web, it’s easy to take extraordinary photography for granted, but every once in a while, when I stop to think about what I am able witness on my laptop screen, I am blown away. An extreme example is Slate’s recent round-up of the year’s best images in astronomy. Here you’ll find photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter interspersed with earth-bound shots of the Northern Lights.

Reading Place: Just Looking
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Best of Essays

Best of Essays
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My Spanish Shawl

By MARIA TERRONE
 
In which authors write about their objects and the places they’ve been

Magic the shawl that kept slipping down my bare, 20-year-old shoulders—a garment possessed but impossible to hold.

Spanish shawl

My Spanish Shawl
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Abu Dhabi Reads Life of Pi

 

It began with an innocent question from a student intern: “Why don’t we do one of those community reads things?” The other student writers for Electra Street, the arts and humanities journal at NYU Abu Dhabi, thought it sounded like a great idea. I, as the faculty editor, was filled with grown-up skepticism about staging a literary conversation in a city as diverse and seemingly unbookish as Abu Dhabi, which does not even have a library that is open to the public with any regularity. But somewhere between student optimism and faculty skepticism, “Abu Dhabi Reads” took root, and one warm night in early November, more fifty people from all over this desert city gathered in a garden at NYU to talk about Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi

Abu Dhabi Reads Life of Pi
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Anna Karenina: The Movie. If the Book Is So Great, Why Do We Need Adaptations?

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

“The Book Is Always Better” read a sign perched on top of a stack of Harry Potters and Twilights in the Harvard Coop bookstore last spring. I remembered the sign waiting in line to see director Joe Wright’s new Anna Karenina, adapted by Tom Stoppard and starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

IMDB lists twenty-seven movie and TV versions of Anna K, going back to 1907. The 700-page book has also been made into at least four ballets and ten operas.

I’m not a screenwriter, but I imagine the elevator pitch goes something like: “Whaddya think, boss? Beautiful high-society woman married to a stiff finds passionate love with a handsome officer, and her husband and society treat her so bad she throws herself in front of a train. Not bad, eh?”

Anna Karenina: The Movie. If the Book Is So Great, Why Do We Need Adaptations?
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