metazine

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

The more we learn about J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.

Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

Since Monday, March 2, Israel’s armed forces have launched daily airstrikes on Lebanon. Begun after Hezbollah fired a small volley of rockets into Israel

A dispatch from the Art Editor