Reading the world from my New York City apartment

After writing last week about the bitter feelings of regret that permeate Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I found myself wanting to explore this emotion from a different angle. My choice this week is "Feathers” by Raymond Carver, a story that is both odd and deeply moving. "Feathers” opens Carver's 1983 collection Cathedral. I have had this book for years and have read some of the stories, but I had never read this one until now. Carver, a master of the short s

I’m a latecomer to The White Lotus, but I’ve now devoured the first two seasons. It’s cleverly plotted, smartly written and the locales (Hawaii in Season 1, and Sicily in Season 2) are gorgeous. This TV series has also sent me back, unexpectedly, to thinking about Ernest Hemingway. Each season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy guests at a luxury resort who both lose and reveal themselves while on vacation. By the end of the trip, someone also ends up dead. I'm war

Before discussing this book, let’s take a short detour into the nuances of grammar. I promise this is going somewhere. In English, there is an important difference between “a,” an indefinite article, and “the,” which is definite. “A giraffe” could refer to any of the long-necked, spotted animals, while “the giraffe” indicates a specific one. When you stack together multiple articles and nouns, the shades of meaning can get murkier. In essayist Janet Malcolm’s famous takedown

When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba

There are a hundred ways to choose a book. Reviews, recommendations, or maybe you just like the picture on the cover. I've been known to seek out books after spotting other people reading them on the subway. But this is the first time I've picked up a book because its plot is centered on my birthday. In Book One of On the Calculation of Volume by Danish novelist Solvej Balle, antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter has somehow become trapped living the same day on an endless loop

Last week, I wrote about the universal pull of moon stories in the wake of the Artemis II lunar mission. Now, on to the book I read recently that put me in a celestial frame of mind: John Steinbeck's World War II novella, The Moon Is Down . I only came across this Steinbeck book recently and decided to read it because I was intrigued by the title. It comes from a chilling scene in Macbeth , when Fleance warns that "the moon is down" just before Macbeth murders King Duncan. Fo