Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday 31 May 2015


Sunday reading on nybooks.comA new report on Gaza, a biography of Saul Bellow, Bernini’s touch, ancient Roman glass, a story by Deborah Eisenberg, and the loves of Walt Whitman (born on this day in 1819).
SPONSORED BY ZED BOOKS
Nathaniel Rich
If Bellow continues to be read, it will be for the exuberant prose, the rigorous wrestling with ideas, and the exquisitely vivid evocation of the eras and places that he occupied. In a noisy world, his fiction creates a refuge.
 
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Ingrid D. Rowland
In 1619, at the ripe age of twenty, Gian Lorenzo Bernini set himself the seemingly impossible challenge of carving the human soul in marble.
 
David Shulman
Israelis like to think that their army holds to high moral standards, and they react badly to hard evidence that shows this is not the case.
 
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Madeleine Schwartz
The Metropolitan Museum’s first ancient glass exhibit is a welcome reminder of just how keen the Romans were about precious glassware.
 
J.M. Coetzee
Whitman’s democracy is a civic religion energized by a broadly erotic feeling that men have for women, and women for men, and women for women, but above all that men have for other men. (2005)
 
Deborah Eisenberg
“Who is that?” Adam asked, pointing at a boy on a swing set. Adam was helping, pasting photographs into an album at the kitchen table. His mother, rolling out a piecrust at the counter, paused to look. (2011)