Albert Camus

Review: Jim Holt's compelling 'Why Does the World Exist?'

2012-07-08 00:00:00

-------------------- Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story Jim Holt Liveright: 310 pp., $27.95 -------------------- "How old is the Universe?" Kurt Vonnegut asked in his 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions." "It is one half-second...

Critic's Notebook: Under the influence of Hemingway

2011-07-03 00:00:00

For much of the 1980s, beginning when I was in college, I used to read a Hemingway book a year. The point was not self-improvement but rather a kind of exploration: What was it, exactly, about his writing that I'd missed? I had read "The Sun Also Rises"...

Film Independent announces lineup for Los Angeles Film Festival

2012-05-01 16:37:40

Music review: Monday Evening Concerts premieres Kurtag's Beckett

2011-12-06 16:32:53

Albert Camus died on this day in 1960

2012-01-04 16:35:21

The Directors: Steven Soderbergh, 'Contagion'

2011-09-04 00:00:00

Henry Carlisle dies at 84; author, translator helped bring Solzhenitsyn's work to Western audiences

2011-07-30 00:00:00

Henry Carlisle, a San Francisco author, translator and former editor who with his wife helped bring two works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Western audiences, has died. He was 84. Carlisle died of complications from pneumonia July 11 in San Francisco,...

C'est vrai? Camus was killed by the KGB?

2011-08-10 16:35:11

Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe

2011-06-01 16:35:02

Science and religion: natural adversaries?

2009-07-30 12:05:00

Today's topic: Biologist Stephen J. Gould famously observed that religion and science deal with different but compatible realities. Was he correct? A god definable by science is no god Point: Michael Shermer Cartoonist Sidney Harris once illustrated...

Noah Charney's 'Stealing the Mystic Lamb': Book Review

2011-01-15 00:00:00

By what measures do we assign "greatness" to artworks? The word of experts? Public acclaim? Monetary value? By these standards, Jan and Hubert van Eyck's "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb," also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, surely warrants a place in...

Five summers, memorable for the reading

2011-05-22 00:00:00

1974: Unhappy at summer camp, I holed up in my bunk and read Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Bernard Malamud's "The Natural." The camp might have been awful, but the books were anything but. 1980: In June, I attended a writers conference at UC...

During her 33 years at the Virginia Quarterly Review, Charlotte Kohler published works by Eudora Welty and James Dickey , as well as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre , and she was the first U.S. editor to publish South African writer Nadine Gordimer .

2008-10-06 16:29:21