A House With Too Many Doors
A review of Ilse Kovac's new novel about three sisters who inherit a house that keeps rearranging itself.
Column
Criticism
Nothing Happens, Beautifully
A review of the festival favorite "Low Tide," a two-hour film about a family that mostly just waits for the ferry.
The Architecture of the Strip Mall, Reconsidered
The strip mall is the most honest building type we have produced in a century - it promises nothing it does not deliver, which may be why we cannot forgive it.
A Close Reading of the Modern Obituary
The obituary has quietly changed shape in the last decade - less achievement, more anecdote - and the shift tells us something about what we now think a life is for.
Everything Askew: On the New Wing at the Harrow Museum
A review of the museum's disorienting new galleries, built with floors and walls deliberately off the level.
The Archive as Confession
A review of a new biography that treats its subject's discarded drafts as more honest than any of her finished books.
Why the Sequel Always Disappoints, and Why We Keep Watching
Nobody expects the sequel to be better. We watch it anyway, for reasons that have very little to do with quality and everything to do with company.
The Museum That Forgot Its Own Collection
Somewhere in the basement is a piece nobody currently on staff has ever seen catalogued, in a museum that has otherwise done everything right.
What the Restored Painting Loses
Every restoration is also an erasure - of dirt, yes, but also of the centuries the dirt was quietly recording.
On the Novel That Refuses to End
The novel is six hundred pages of genuine craft attached to an ending that never comes, and I am no longer sure the author thinks that is a flaw.
