Deepti Kapoor’s beautiful and spellbinding debut novel, 2015’s release of A Bad Character from Alfred A. Knopf, is about love and loss in modern-day New Delhi.

Jade Sharma’s Problems is a gutsy work of fiction that doesn’t skimp on the raw details and, ultimately, delivers a sense of resolution for its troubled narrator

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

The Libertarian presidential and vice presidential nominees, Gary Johnson and William Weld, are drawing votes from the Democratic nominee for president. This is because members of the Millennial generation, voters under 30, who believe that the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee are equally evil, are casting a protest vote for the Libertarians.

PEN America's take on today's most pressing threats to free expression

The world is in shock over the United States election. Tensions remain high over the election of non-establishment GOP candidate Donald Trump against traditional democrat, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

You're left with a choice
To gather remnants
Of what you once loved

The beginning of the contemporary notion of performance, be it poetic or visual (on the contemporary scene they don’t exclude one another) could be traced back to the Nietzsche’s notion of Gay Science.

In 1992, after the first read through of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman show examining the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Smith received an apathetic response. Everybody in the audience, made up largely of theater professionals, she recalls, “said that no one will care about this play.” 

It’s often said that a historical dramatization usually has less to say about the time period it is depicting and more about the time in which it is made. When looking at the first big studio depiction of whistleblower Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s Snowden,

Crossing Tillary Street against the light on April 29, the day of the memorial service for John Farris, my foot catches in a crack, the bones twist out, my ankle cracks, the devil wins at craps. I have a sudden vision of John last time I saw him about a year ago.

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a recent addition to an arguably saturated market of slavery-fixated media. Nevertheless, Whitehead’s intelligent and exquisitely written prose distinguishes the novel from other artistic meditations mining similar historical material. 

This year, the zeitgeist spells split selves. More and more of life is lived across media, says the closest cultural majority. We, as in me, are fraying across platforms.

Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world. 

Please join us for a brand new season of Neighborhood Slice, starting this week! 

 

Occasionally a film comes along that manages to land on a hot button issue at the exact moment when it is heavily present in the cultural consciousness. 

At the ICI Curatorial Hub (September 13, 2016), art writer Lydia Y. Nichols spoke with writer & scholar Steve Cannon, founder of A Gathering of the Tribes and a pioneer of the East Village literary and visual art scenes, about the lived experience of visual culture in their shared hometown of New Orleans and in New York City.

When Kati Duncan-Cunningham, a New York attorney, wandered into an art exhibit at Unleashed Arts Center in June, she felt a kinship to the arts community in Winston-Salem. That experience led her to invite several Winston-Salem artists to exhibit their work in Brooklyn beginning Nov. 5.

Alan Kaufman is a critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist, poet and author of the groundbreaking"Outlaw" anthologies.  The fourth and latest in the series is The Outlaw Bible of American Art.