Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

The Hours

an opera by Kevin Puts, with a libretto by Greg Pierce, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 22–December 15, 2022

February 9, 2023 issue

Benjamin’s Rival Tempters

The correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem reveals that despite their intellectual differences, their shared mission to preserve Walter Benjamin’s work led to a genuine fondness between them.

Correspondence, 1939–1969

by Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, edited and with an introduction by Asaf Angermann, translated from the German by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski

June 9, 2022 issue

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

by Kira Thurman

February 10, 2022 issue

Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life

Lewis Lockwood’s survey of the history of Beethoven biography shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.

Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition

by Lewis Lockwood

September 23, 2021 issue

The Symbolic Animal

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 3: Phenomenology of Cognition

by Ernst Cassirer, translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon

April 8, 2021 issue

The People’s Novel

Peter Weiss makes a passionate case that for the poor, communism offered access to spiritual and intellectual realms from which they had historically been excluded.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1

by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and a glossary by Robert Cohen

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2

by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Scott, with an afterword by Jürgen Schutte

January 14, 2021 issue

Chekhov’s Laughter

Fifty-Two Stories: 1883–1898

by Anton Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

September 24, 2020 issue

Resisting English

The work of Minae Mizumura

The Fall of Language in the Age of English

by Minae Mizumura, translated from the Japanese by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter

A True Novel

by Minae Mizumura, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author

Inheritance from Mother

by Minae Mizumura, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author

October 24, 2019 issue

Painting by Maira Kalman from Sara Berman’s Closet, an illustrated family memoir created with her son, Alex Kalman, after their museum exhibition of the same name. It has just been published by Harper Design.

Primal Visions

Moods

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole

Curriculum Vitae

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole

The Shunra and the Schmetterling

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole

The Heart Is Katmandu

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole

The Christ of Fish

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Eddie Levenston

Bernhard

by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Alan Treister with Eddie Levenston

See all reviewed works

See less

December 6, 2018 issue

Zionist Regrets

Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah

by David Biale

Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

by Noam Zadoff, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Green

Greetings from Angelus: Poems

by Gershom Scholem, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth, with an introduction and annotations by Steven M. Wasserstrom

The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

edited by Marie Luise Knott and translated from the German by Anthony David

Werner Scholem: A German Life

by Mirjam Zadoff, translated from the German by Dona Geyer

See all reviewed works

See less

June 28, 2018 issue

Egon Schiele: The Artist’s Mother, Sleeping, 1911

Stuff of Scandal

Klimt and Schiele: Drawn

an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 25–May 28, 2018

Klimt and Schiele: Drawings

by Katie Hanson

May 10, 2018 issue

Jacques Offenbach; engraving by André Gill from the cover of La Lune, 1866

Classical Cancan

Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture

by Laurence Senelick

The Real “Tales of Hoffmann”: Origin, History, and Restoration of an Operatic Masterpiece

by Vincent Giroud and Michael Kaye, with a foreword by Plácido Domingo

Les contes d’Hoffmann

an opera by Jacques Offenbach, directed by Bartlett Sher, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, September 26–October 28, 2017

January 18, 2018 issue

Ironists of a Vanished Empire

Marjorie Perloff’s ‘Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire’

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

by Marjorie Perloff

June 22, 2017 issue

What Does Handke Demand?

March 23, 2017 issue

Peter Handke in the garden of Bartenstein Castle, Schrozberg, Germany, 1999

The Stranger in Love

The Moravian Night: A Story

by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston

February 9, 2017 issue

Letter

Scott Abbott

What Does Handke Demand?

March 23, 2017 issue

Trilling’s Letters

November 10, 2016 issue

Songs Beyond Mankind

Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry

by Paul Celan, translated from the German and with commentary by Pierre Joris

June 23, 2016 issue

The World Turned Upside Down

The Man in the High Castle

a television series created by Frank Spotnitz and adapted from the novel by Philip K. Dick

January 14, 2016 issue

Paul Scheerbart's Utopias

Paul Scheerbart, a German writer whose name is only now becoming familiar to English readers, had little commercial or critical success during his lifetime, and only a small audience appreciated his speculative science fiction or his wildly imaginative, futuristic manifestoes.

December 16, 2015

Dietrich Bonhoeffer at an ecumenical conference, Gland, Switzerland, August 1932

The Changing Faith of a Hero

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

by Charles Marsh

December 3, 2015 issue