Colm Tóibín | The New York Review of Books

‘We Must Be Light!’

What emerges most strongly from James Merrill’s collected letters is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.

A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill

edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser

June 10, 2021 issue

John Singer Sargent: Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881

Shadow Selves

‘The Man in the Red Coat’ by Julian Barnes

The Man in the Red Coat

by Julian Barnes

August 20, 2020 issue

Students from a boys’ school with a priest, Rome, 1953

Nasty, Brutish, and Long

The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar

June 11, 2020 issue

Pat Steir's 'Waterfall' Paintings

While it should be possible for someone looking at Pat Steir’s “Waterfall” paintings at the Barnes Foundation to feel that they depict or suggest the flowing of water downward over rock or stone, that is to miss the point of works that are concerned much more with the potential of paint than the need to represent something in nature.

May 11, 2019

Jacopo Tintoretto: The Last Supper, 87 x 162 5/8 inches, circa 1563–1564

Tintoretto’s Wildness

‘Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice’ at the National Gallery of Art, through July 7, 2019

Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice

an exhibition at the Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, September 7, 2018–January 6, 2019; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 10–July 7, 2019

May 9, 2019 issue

Children and staff at the Trump administration’s tent facility for detaining migrant children separated from their parents, Tornillo, Texas, June 19, 2018

Our Concentration Camps

This generation will be remembered for having allowed for concentration camps for children to be built on “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is happening here and now, but not in our names.

November 6, 2018

Élisabeth Greffulhe in her ‘swan’ persona; photograph by Otto Wegener, circa 1887

The Aristocracy’s Swann Song

Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

by Caroline Weber

October 11, 2018 issue

Desolation Row

Lorca was interested in simple freedoms in a period in Spain when nothing was simple

Poet in Spain

by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio

April 5, 2018 issue

Joseph Conrad arriving in New York on the SS Tuscania, 1923

The Heart of Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger.

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

by Maya Jasanoff

February 22, 2018 issue

The Class Renegade

Édouard Louis’s ‘The End of Eddy’

The End of Eddy

by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Michael Lucey

July 13, 2017 issue

Shadows & Ghosts

The Schooldays of Jesus

by J.M. Coetzee

May 11, 2017 issue

Stephen Spender, New York Review editor Robert Silvers, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Natasha Spender, New York City, 1980s

The Talented, Trapped Spenders

A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents

by Matthew Spender

Worlds Apart: A Memoir

by David Plante

April 7, 2016 issue

She Played Hard with Happiness

‘The Complete Stories’ by Clarice Lispector

The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Moser

December 17, 2015 issue

Francis Bacon: Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1976; oil on canvas, in three parts, each 14 x 12 inches

Late Francis Bacon: Spirit & Substance

November 19, 2015 issue

Stig Dagerman in the Stockholm archipelago, 1951

The Hard-Won Truth of the North

German Autumn

by Stig Dagerman, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson, with a foreword by Mark Kurlansky

Island of the Doomed

by Stig Dagerman, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson, with a foreword by J.M.G. Le Clézio

A Burnt Child

by Stig Dagerman, translated from the Swedish by Benjamin Mier-Cruz, with an introduction by Per Olov Enquist

Sleet: Selected Stories

by Stig Dagerman, translated from the Swedish by Steven Hartman, with a preface by Alice McDermott

July 9, 2015 issue

François de Poilly the Younger after Charles Coypel: Don Quixote Mistakes Puppets for Moors and Believes He Is Rescuing Two Runaway Lovers, 1723 (click images to enlarge)

Gawking at Quixote

A brilliantly coherent show at the Frick explores the French artist Charles Coypel’s remarkable illustrations of Don Quixote.

April 15, 2015

Francisco Goya: Self-Portrait While Painting, circa 1795

Goya: Order and Disorder

A selection of prints and paintings from “Goya: Order and Disorder” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with commentary by Colm Tóibín.

January 21, 2015

The Dark & Light of Francisco Goya

An artist whose imagination was ripe for horror

Goya: Order and Disorder

an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 12, 2014–January 19, 2015

December 18, 2014 issue

Lust and Loss in Madrid

The novels of Javier Marías and Antonio Muñoz Molina

The Infatuations

by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

In the Night of Time

by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

July 10, 2014 issue

Charles Dickens, about to begin a public reading, 1858

Those Dickens Kids

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens

by Robert Gottlieb

May 23, 2013 issue