Elizabeth Murray and Jessica Hagedorn discuss ordinary objects, domestic novels, and what it means to be feminist.

For Kerry James Marshall, 1997 was a good year: a MacArthur Fellowship, the Whitney Biennial and Documenta X. He spoke with Calvin Reid about the future of painting. 

Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, a partially fictionalized account of one English journalist’s struggle to save a Bosnian child, captures the moral dilemmas of war reporting.

Wong Kar-wai’s films are kooky, cool and without being sappy, utterly romantic. The enfant terrible of Hong Kong cinema talks with playwright Han Ong about why he puts in what others leave out.

In Flight Among the Tombs, Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Hecht assumes the voice of Death—as a society lady, a Mexican revolutionary, a film director, and, of course, a poet. Daniel Anderson and Philip Stephens survey thirty years of Hecht’s poetry.

From the Okra Orchestra’s fast and funky sounds to his first album, In The World, this Mississippi trickster serves his music HOT. Rhythm and blues to theater and be-bop, Olu Dara is always the ultimate storyteller

Martin Sherman’s Bent played on Broadway in 1979. Since then, the playwright had been living in London. In 1998, with A Madhouse in Goa and the film version of Bent, Sherman returned to the States with a vengeance.

Playwrights Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) compare notes on the East/West conflict, the Third World Movement, and Gotanda’s play, Ballad of Yachiyo.

Though he has lived in New York for over a decade, Bruce Pearson’s recent paintings are still marked by the psychedelic aesthetic that he absorbed while growing up in San Francisco. 

Jason Rhoades’s installations can be likened to a yard sale organized according to the principles of free association and stream of consciousness. 

Damon and Affleck star in the film together with Robin Williams and Minnie Driver, with Damon giving a first-rate performance in the title role of Will, an exceedingly bright and troubled guy from the wrong side of the tracks, the tracks in this case being Boston’s South Side.

The icons of our affair with Italian cinema, from La Dolce Vita to L’Avventura, become the painted matter, stilled and contemplative, of Palazzolo’s new body of work. 

This article is only available in print.

One sleeps, / The other walks back and forth.

Wife, child gone, phone-tree confirmation, 1-800-FAM-GONE. I shall eat this pork chop and wine. Breakfast of chop and wine, blue wine pink chop, sweep the floor, clean house. Dust-free environment in which to begin breathing. Down. Wine and chop. Chop. Wine. Purple.

Your skin is your uniform. A beacon and a membrane. Something to hold it all together.

“We fill pre-existing forms, and when/ we fill them, change them and are changed,” Frank Bidart writes in the mysterious, revelatory Desire—writes twice, as it happens, as if to shadow the recurrent and intractable figure (“we are the wheel to which we are bound”) of his totemic subject.

Complicity through knowledge is at the center of Javier Marías’s award-winning Spanish novel. 

Helen Gee, in her charming and frequently hilarious memoir, Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties, tells how and why she was able to keep this country’s only serious photography gallery in the 1950s open and solvent.

Elizabeth, the audacious heroine of No Lease on Life, would like to murder, preferably by knife or strangulation—pleading temporary insanity—the crusty junkies and skinheads who inhabit her tenement street.

Susan Yankowitz’s work in the theater spans three decades. Her plays are vividly theatrical, taking place in a heightened landscape of elevated language and time-bends.

Zhang Yimou’s new movie begins with a boy’s unrequited love for a girl all over the jammed streets of contemporary Beijing. The girl’s new boyfriend, a thug, beats the boy up.

Mimicking the methods of the news media, Johan Grimonprez has created an anxiety-provoking, manipulative, and exhilarating 68-minute film titled dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.

Two books due out this winter combine image and text in ways which enhance both forms of expression—I Could Read the Sky, a novel by Timothy O’Grady with photographs by Steve Pyke, and Photographs and Poems, by Jeanette Montgomery Barron and Jorie Graham.

Like a mirage in a desert, the landscapes in Adam Ross’s paintings and drawings are as unreal as a vision seen by a delirious time traveler. 

Michael Jensen brings a naturalist’s touch to a modernist’s aesthetic. The key lies in Jensen’s materials and the manner in which he combines them

If you think that art and fun have too little to do with one another, you’ve probably never seen a painting by Michael Reafsnyder. 

Rivka Rinn makes art with a “kinda” new medium that artists on both sides of the Atlantic have toyed with, computer-scanned ink on canvas.

Word spread through the hip music circles of Hollywood: the guy who plays the late show every Friday night at Club Largo has to be seen to be believed.

I must confess, initially I was somewhat resistant to Rickie Lee Jones’s new album, Ghostyhead. 

Memoir, biography, nonfiction novel—all of these terms apply to My Sister Life, a stunning and disturbing book by poet and novelist Maria Flook.