Art and Culture

Margaret Tynes, an American soprano who was acclaimed in Europe but neglected in the United States at a time when Black singers were newly breaking into the operatic world, died on March 7 in Silver Spring, Md. She was 104.Her nephew…
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What’s a mistake, and I think unhealthy, is to believe that a series’s worth is retroactively determined by its ending, no matter what came before it. Because that promotes an even sadder idea: That it’s a bad move to invest too much in…
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Ibuki Hibi Lee remembers waking up to the sounds of her mother’s paintbrush hitting the canvas in their small New York City apartment.After World War II, during which their family was incarcerated at an internment camp in Utah, they…
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Reading is sexy, as Rory Gilmore and a million tee shirt designs will attest. Celebrities regularly have photo shoots that “catch” them reading a classic novel to make them look even more attractive. A couple of years…
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TOPEKA — A day after a Facebook spokesman apologized for blocking Kansas Reflector articles by mistake, the social media giant blocked all links to two other news sites that republished a Kansas…
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Justin Peck knows the campfire at the center of his Broadway dance-led show Illinoise (St. James Theatre, April 24 to Aug. 10) very well indeed. It doesn’t just warm the hands of the characters, and encourage the telling of stories,…
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. For me, so much of writing is about listening: listening to the sound of cars whizzing by on my street, to the faraway sounds of movement on the highway that I…
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Pity the writer who believes they have written the next Cloud Atlas! A literary agent once told me that when a fledgling writer compares their novel to David Mitchell’s, he invariably knows it will be awful. Once you have written a book…
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The art world mutates faster than the human eye can take in. It resembles the fashion industry far more than it does, say, publishing or theatre or even Hollywood, which all seem gentle by comparison. It is not, then, such a great shock…
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It’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett is nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his way across the city…
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