Reading the world from my New York City apartment

When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba

There are a hundred ways to choose a book. Reviews, recommendations, or maybe you just like the picture on the cover. I've been known to seek out books after spotting other people reading them on the subway. But this is the first time I've picked up a book because its plot is centered on my birthday. In Book One of On the Calculation of Volume by Danish novelist Solvej Balle, antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter has somehow become trapped living the same day on an endless loop

Last week, I wrote about the universal pull of moon stories in the wake of the Artemis II lunar mission. Now, on to the book I read recently that put me in a celestial frame of mind: John Steinbeck's World War II novella, The Moon Is Down . I only came across this Steinbeck book recently and decided to read it because I was intrigued by the title. It comes from a chilling scene in Macbeth , when Fleance warns that "the moon is down" just before Macbeth murders King Duncan. Fo

Like so many others, I was transfixed this past week by the awe-inspiring Artemis II mission to circle the moon, and by the perilous re-entry and dramatic splashdown that brought our astronauts safely back to Earth. Even before Artemis blasted off, I had been thinking about how the moon is emblematic of so many things: madness, danger, melancholy, longing, romance and more. I had just finished reading a book with "moon" in the title, though I'm saving that discussion for anot

Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans. Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun , his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become

A company in South Korea made headlines last year when it announced it would award employees 100 million won (about $75,000) for every baby that they have. It's part of an effort to reverse the country’s low birth rate, which has been fueled by high living costs, a grinding work culture, and the growing sentiment among many young women that marriage isn't worth the hassle. In the short and sly novel Apartment Women , first published in Korean in 2018 and translated into Engli