The Threepenny Review

THE THEREMIN looks less like a musical instrument than it does a transistor radio, or a telegraph machine, or the black boxes that survive plane crashes. It has antennae, as if it could pick up lost broadcasts, as if it might be something extraterres

I AM A slow reader. And so, because I know that any book I pick up may be with me for a while, I read good stuff. Over decades of reading good stuff, I have developed some ideas about the elements that are at the heart of much if not all great litera

The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, edited by Sahm Venter. Liveright, 2018, $35.00 cloth. IN 1952, shortly after he was made a Deputy President of the African National Congress and roughly a decade before he was first imprisoned by the apartheid r

The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America by Philip Dray. Basic Books, 2018, $32.00 cloth. ONE OF the more indelible images of my boyhood: a group of us, young, teenagers in name only, sitting around a cabin probably not as rustic and rem

I HAD ALREADY finished my studies when I found out about my father’s other child, the boy. I hadn’t known my father was dying, or that he had another family, though to say another seems strange—I had never thought of him and my mother and me as a fam

THERE’S A MOVIE out now that centers around two characters, and while such types are not uncommon in real life, they’ve merited very little attention from writers and movie-makers. I’m talking about the “failed artist” and the “has-been”; the former,

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—Turn wheresoe’er I may,By night or day,The things which I have seen I now can see no more —Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli, 1944. The Curse

JEROME KERN was George Gershwin’s favorite songwriter. Both Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, as young men breaking into musical theater in the Twenties, memorized some of Kern’s popular melodies, and I think you can hear his wholehearted approach—the wa

HERE’S THE joke. A guy leaves his accordion in the back seat of the car while he’s shopping and returns to find the window smashed. “So someone stole the accordion?” “No, they left another one.” I rarely volunteer that I play the accordion. I’m not

Don Giovanni, composed by W. A. Mozart, directed by Richard Jones. Norwegian National Opera, Oslo, May 2018. Don Giovanni, composed by W. A. Mozart, directed by Louisa Proske. Heartbeat Opera, New York, May 2018. THE OSLO Opera House is one of the

IF NO movement is detected for a certain interval, the professor’s office goes dark. In this it’s like every other office in the building, equipped with sensors meant to conserve the energy wasted when a professor, done for the day, forgets to turn t