Alice Neel (1900–1984) was the most independent-minded painter in New York, “a grande, if often rude, dame” who turned her back on the art world to plant her flag in the neglected genre of portraiture. By the time her career took off in the 1960s, this ultimate bohemian had worked for the WPA, lived on […]

Has the sexual revolution, on balance, been a good thing? Rather than freeing us, sexual liberation seems to have subjected our sex lives to the laws of the consumer economy: unequally distributed resources, cycles of feast and famine, competitiveness, acquisitiveness (are other people getting more?). Is sex on the free market really what we wanted? […]

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. The underwater passage, […]

Sara Maitland doesn’t grow her own vegetables; she doesn’t knit; she wouldn’t want to do without central heating. She smokes. She spent all her life to the age of 50 talking, first as a member of a large and noisy family, then as a writer, lecturer, and activist living in London. She’s not the sort […]

In Atwood’s funniest novel in ages, two women have survived a pandemic, one barricaded in a beauty salon, the other sequestered in an endangered-species-themed strip club. In flashbacks, we learn they’re both members of an environmentalist group called “God’s Gardeners,” which doubles as an ecoterrorist cell. Always a brilliant social satirist, Atwood lovingly parodies Christian […]

It’s occurred to me to wonder what Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” would be like if the two survivors were not a father and son but a mother and daughter. I picture the mother plodding through the ashy landscape, coughing, wishing she had some Kleenex. The daughter sulks and dreams about that cute boy at school. They pause to shoot a marauder. They raid a drugstore for tampons. They trudge on.

There are echoes of my fantasy…

In the beginning, before the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. Qfwfq can tell you about it: He was there. “Naturally, we were all there—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time, either: What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” …

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-22/books/the-complete-cosmicomics-a-holy-grail-for-italo-calvino-fans/

John Adams, the first United States envoy to the Netherlands, could have been the prototype for an American in Europe. When he arrived on the Continent in 1778, two years after the Colonies declared independence from England, the 42-year-old New England farmer, lawyer, and leader of the Revolution had never traveled farther from home than […]

The “home” Marilynne Robinson writes about in her new novel looks at first like an American cliché of contentment: a little Midwestern farm town in the 1950s, and in it the large, comfortable house of the widowed reverend Robert Boughton. In this house in Gilead, Iowa, he and his wife raised their eight children, Boughton’s […]

My pick in the Village Voice Best Books of the Year list.