Andrew Martin

An Off-Kilter Epic

In a revival of Tennessee Williams’s rarely staged Orpheus Descending, small-town outcasts buck the codes of southern propriety. 

The Documentarian

Zachary Lazar so convincingly blurs real and imaginary characters that his novels avoid objective truth altogether, even though their prose is written like a journalist’s.

Every Man His Own Hipster

A new production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window retains the play’s sense of imperfect community and teeming life. 

DeLillo Studies

Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a mashup of cinematic tropes and references, never finds the even tone that holds the novel’s contradictions together.

Castle’s Kingdom

James Castle’s drawings and constructions seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe of art-making and do not easily yield their meanings.

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

Getting Away With It

Nell Zink’s books are defined by a fervent restlessness, a desire to ignore the strictures that usually confine the contemporary novel.

Women on the Verge

A More Personal Chile

Songs of Experience

Johnny Cash’s Lost Decade

Out Among The Stars is a new album consisting of songs from “lost” sessions Johnny Cash recorded in the 1980s. In sound it’s nearly the opposite of the pared-down albums Cash made with Rick Rubin that revived his career.

The Cradle of Soul

Muscle Shoals tells the story of how a tiny Alabama town on the Tennessee River became the site of some of the best rock and soul music recordings of the 1960s and 1970s.

Send the Intern!

I was hired as an intern at The New York Review during my last month as an undergraduate, when the previous intern was abruptly deported. After interviewing at the old office on 56th and Broadway, I started work during the first week in our light-filled place on Hudson Street, in the spring of 2008. Bob’s desk, for the only time in my tenure, had only two or three hundred pieces of paper on it.