There are two difficulties with writing about Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. One is saying anything fresh about them. The other is seeing them at all.
Louise Glück weaves together poetry and prayer. Kathryn Davis writes of loving, reading, dreaming, and dying. The two leave us unmoored and longing for more.
A Commonweal Christmas tradition: Editors and friends of the magazine offer book recommendations that may just be the perfect gift for someone on your list.
“When I started writing this review, I resolved to avoid the mawkish, almost elegiac tone that often seeps into essays about Scialabba. As you can see, I’ve failed.”
Brad DeLong’s expansive economic history is organized around a question: Why, despite constant innovation, haven’t we solved our deepest economic problems?
In Lance Morrow’s new book, the veteran ‘Time’ essayist drops names, complains about boomers, and offers an apologia for the journalism of the “American Century.”
Critics have described Cormac McCarthy as a writer beyond good and evil. But beneath the neuter austerity of McCarthy’s prose, a keen moral imagination is at work.
