“I like flirting with disaster. I like terms that are open and provocative and unusual and evocative and we don’t know where things will be going next.”

Phillip Lopate has had a good year, publishing To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction and Portrait Inside My Head. He spoke with Sharlin about humor, honesty, and his identity as a native New Yorker.

A.M. Homes has an “oddly revealing” conversation with painter and friend Jane Fine. Homes’s new book May We Be Forgiven is in stores now.

Driven by collaboration, combining old and new methods, and a unique symbolism, Deborah Gans speaks to Richard J. Goldstein about the rose window she and Kiki Smith designed for the landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue.

“I used to want to separate the poet from the translator in me, but that’s no longer possible, nor is it desirable. On the contrary.” 

“I have diversity in my work, but I also have control of it. I rarely paint things that I like.”

“Many people who study composition start out as improvisers in jazz or rock, working in bands on music that is not particularly notated. They hear some crazy and wild music and they want to figure out how it works; they hear a piece by Charles Ives or Cage or whatever, and then they want to be able to do that, but it comes out of a visceral impulse.” Anthony Coleman

I learned early to differentiate art from politics. But the best Israeli films are inseparable from the political forces that shape them. 

In The Seventh Beggar, Pearl Abraham has created a novel about the nature of storytelling beginning with Genesis. She takes us into a world that ranges from golems to robotics, mystical systems to artificial intelligence.

Ben Katchor is a recorder of vanished and vanishing places, a poet of the vast metropolis of New York. He notices, crucially, what others walk by, fail to see and generally disregard—a man living in the mosaic while seeing its details. 

Mauricio Kagel’s seminar in Aix-en-Provence, France, in the summer of 1981, sponsored by the organization Centre Acanthes, was a turning point in my life.

Robbie Baitz is a little bit of a communist in the way that Tolstoy was a little bit of a communist. He is fascinated by the backside of power and, I believe, could be as precise and loquacious in ripping Napoleon a new one as Count Leo ever was. 

Archie Rand discusses his Diaspora Paintings and what it means to make Jewish art.

A neuroradiologist and writer whose father is an Orthodox rabbi, Aryeh Lev Stollman grew up in a home surrounded by both religious and secular books. 

A decade ago, with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World, a lively academic debate centered on whether the date should be celebrated, or, for all that the New World’s native inhabitants had suffered, remembered in mourning. 

The first pieces I heard of John Zorn’s were both titled Lacrosse, one from 1979 and the other from 1981. 

Downtown, no-wave, rock, free-prov guitarist Marc Ribot ventures intrepid into “prosthetic” Cubanismo on his album Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos. David Krasnow asks: “What’s this Jewish guy from Jersey doing playing the son montuno?”

In his new, luminous book, Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, asks the question: Does an unhappy man know more than a happy man?

Few fiction writers have captured the painful realities of the Holocaust as well as Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. He speaks here of the power of memory, the power of the spirit, and the place of religion and homeland as he has come to know it.

Uhry’s first play, Driving Miss Daisy, won a Pulitzer Prize. His Obie-nominated play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, is a poignant and hilarious encounter with an Atlanta family of German-Jewish descent just before the outbreak of WWII.