Charles Finch

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Charles Finch

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, by Alissa WilkinsonWe go on needing Joan Didion. The aloof gaze; the Scotch and cigarette chic; the crestfallen scrutiny of America, of life. Whatever combined in her, we seek it over and over, in a way that seems only to be intensifying since her death in 2021. She has become one of the things she was most suspicious of: a myth. One of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.

Nov 21, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Charles Finch

Did the first cave painters, thirty thousand years ago, get some special reward from the chief? Extra pebbles, maybe, or pottage? The history of art is a history of commerce: a winding helix of transactions down the centuries, the brute power of money bartered for the ethereal authority of beauty. In “Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers,” Jean Strouse delicately and thoroughly traces one such exchange.

Oct 17, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Charles Finch

They are among the very most famous artworks left to us by the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian’s geometric canvases, white backgrounds overlaid with spare, uneven black lines, set off by a few just-so rectilinear regions in the three primary colors, red, yellow, blue.

Sep 26, 2024 | altaonline.com | Charles Finch

Like so many of the greatest American books, This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, is a story of the West. In the memoir’s indelible opening scene, Wolff, known as Toby, and his mother are driving across that meaning-rich line called the Continental Divide when a massive truck loses its brakes and careers off a cliff: a portent of the catastrophic westward years the pair have in store.

Apr 8, 2024 | nytimes.com | Charles Finch

What to Read Find Your Next Book Spring Fiction Preview Spring Nonfiction Preview April Releases 22 Funny Novels What to Read Find Your Next Book Spring Fiction Preview Spring Nonfiction Preview April Releases 22 Funny Novels In her far-reaching latest novel, "The Limits," Nell Freudenberger forges connections between the global and the familial. THE LIMITS, by Nell Freudenberger"The future is already here," goes a line usually attributed to William Gibson.