Literary translation isn't as straightforward as you might think, especially when the choice of a single word can determine the arc of an entire work.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

The environmental author Terry Tempest Williams writes about the collision of the human and natural worlds. She's best known for Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her new book is called Finding Beauty in a Broken World.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Mark Newman, co-author of The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live, says there are more things to understand about the world than how many acres there are in a country. The new book redraws the world in ways other than by land mass.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

In a new book, authors Roger Bennett and Josh Kun detail American Jewish history through vinyl albums. They are trying to answer questions such as, "Who are we?" and "What are we inheriting?" in what Bennett calls the "beginning of a journey."» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

What's fit to print? For Barney Rosset, the answer is an invariable "anything." His Grove Press was known for printing books other publishers wouldn't touch — and for legal crusades that changed American censorship law.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

By Teresa Ghilarducci

By Michael Greenberg Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research by Sue Halpern Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov called his book about his childhood years, and in this incantatory title we can hear our human dread of forgetting. 'The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,' reads the book's first sentence. The crack of light may be described as memory itself--that fickle and unreplicable network of experience and associations from which we construct who we…

By Ehud Olmert On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published an extended interview of lame-duck prime minister Ehud Olmert by journalists Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer. Olmert is a former mayor of Jerusalem (1993-2003), member of the Knesset, and cabinet-level official. In 2005, he left the right-wing Likud party and joined the Kadima party, a centrist alliance formed by then prime minister Ariel Sharon in the wake of Israel's 'disengagement' from the Gaza Strip. Olmert, who served as deputy prime minister in the Kadima-led government,…

By Ian Buruma Kirchner and the Berlin Street an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, August 3–November 10, 2008. When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner put a pistol to his head in Davos, Switzerland, on June 15, 1938, he left more than a thousand oil paintings, several thousand pastels, drawings, and prints, as well as many wood carvings and textiles. Only a fraction of his work was shown at an extraordinary exhibition held recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But this fraction probably comprises the very best of his oeuvre. A handful of paintings, executed just before…

By Leo A. Lensing

"Sea of Poppies," set in Calcutta, is a swashbuckling saga full of sadists, weaklings and tyrants -- and, thankfully, there are two more volumes to come.

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.

Juliana Hatfield talks about her latest -- and possibly finest -- record, her frank new memoir, and life after being a Gen X It Girl

Bill Gates and the Beatles owe their genius to nurture not nature, argues the acclaimed "Tipping Point" author. It's a nice theory.

"Achewood," Chris Onstad's hilarious online comic strip, translates perfectly into a book about male friendship and testosterone overload.