Per publishing custom, the first pages of In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth book and first essay collection, present a selection of critical praise for her previous work. The nature of this praise, all of it pertaining to Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland, is both predictable and particular, with an emphasis on the author’s reputation as “an elegant stylist.” The blurbs celebrate Lahiri’s “legendarily smooth . . . prose style,” her “brilliant language,” and her ability to place “the perfect words in the perfect order.” Beyond the usual hosannas, what emerges is the sense of an author defined by her

A PARADOXICAL DILEMMA awaits the art restorer charged with repairing the damage done by time and mishap to an Alberto Burri painting, because his canvases were made by employing just those elements: aging, accident, and downright destruction. Trained as a doctor in his native Italy, Burri served as a medic during World War II, was captured in Tunisia, and was interned in a POW camp in Texas, which is where he began to paint. When he returned home, he found a culture beaten down by years of Fascist rule and a landscape blasted by Allied bombs. The ravages of war

“My true vocation is preparation for death.” That was the reply offered by polymath, scholar, filmmaker, archivist, and painter Harry Smith when asked what among his many pursuits he believed to be his “truest.” “For that day,” he continued, “I’ll lie on my bed and see my life go before my eyes.” If Smith’s declaration evokes the gnomic, ironic, dissolute, and fanciful, it also characterizes an artist who prized his own obscurity (and the obscurity of his myriad and often uncompleted endeavors) even within the more rarefied cultural circles of the postwar decades. The underground’s underground bard, Smith became famous

The protagonist of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 conjures the material for two hours of plot by getting her cards read in anticipation of a call from her doctor. “I can’t see you yet,” the tarot reader says to the distraught, beautiful woman. “The cards speak better if you appear.” Madame Irma reshuffles the deck after laying out a series of foreboding cards, claiming they are “difficult to read.” Fearful and impatient, having purchased enough portents for one afternoon—“The illness is upon you”; “I see evil forces. A doctor”—Cléo aborts the reading and soon bursts into tears. At

The great Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi was just twenty-three years old when he met the poets and painters who would help him revolutionize the worlds of art, literature, and politics across North Africa and the Middle East. It was 1965, and Morocco was poised between a once-promising independence, which it had won from France nine years earlier (only to see it diminished by the restored monarchy’s crackdown on dissent), and the “years of lead” (zaman al-rasas), which would stretch into four decades of increasingly brutal repression under the reign of King Hassan II. It was also the height of the

Always considered an art form on the outskirts, magic sits at the crossroads of entertainment, pseudo-miracle, sophisticated prank, and con game. The word magician may have once borne connotations of the magi, secret knowledge, and supernatural feats, but now it abides at the junction of Vegas lounge acts, tiny gatherings of semi-legitimate hobbyists-cum-cardsharps, and the sort of dubious, handkerchief-dabbing gentlemen of no fixed address for whom confidence modifies trickster as surely as night follows the day.