Arts + Culture

Author Shome Dasgupta’s latest collection of short stories hearkens to the slum-world surrealism of Gabriel García Márquez. Kolkata is Dasgupta’s Columbia.

What communities like Lafayette have learned about city building from the pioneering urbanist.

I told Greg Guirard I wanted my table to rise from the swamp. I wanted creatures to delight my grandchildren. I wanted art.

In her nonfiction bestseller, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild dives into bayou country, where systematic industrial pollution has devastated residents so completely they’ve come to accept environmental blight as an unavoidable fact of life.

“It would be nice to have some oysters that big, huh?” quips Francis Pavy, the childlike blues of his eyes lusting over his own creation. The object of his desire — a plus-sized oyster etched into a 3-foot-by-4-foot slab of composite vinyl — is a custom-print block, a particularly appetizing example of Pavy’s preferred method […]

How a Japanese immigrant found glory and camaraderie in a nation that once imprisoned him for his race.

A musical based on a novel co-written by humorist Dave Barry, Peter and the Starcatcher is fast-paced and funny, following the orphan Peter Pan before he becomes the flying, mischievous lost boy. But Starcatcher also introduces a new character to the Pan canon, the empowering female lead, Molly — Wendy’s precocious, brainy predecessor. The show […]

Marshall Blevins grew up listening to the blues (Robert Johnson is her favorite), and later devoured Southern authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, resulting, she says, in a “gritty fictive world made in my imagination.” All these influences come to bear in her work, which combines colorful, energetic portrayals of […]

CAST: Derek Joseph: 28, black, poetry student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. Christine Baniewicz: 28, white, nonfiction student at UNO in New Orleans, La. SETTING:  Your own mind. Also, later, Artmosphere.  I.  Derek enters your mind. He’s short, somewhere in the mid-5-foot range, with a distinctively powerful and peculiar presence, a mysteriously hypnotizing […]

Chanel was in the middle of a half-year cooking fellowship in Chicago when she phoned to tell me she’d just won a three-month butchery apprenticeship on an organic farm in rural Italy. A career chef just a couple years removed from the dawn of her vocation, she would leave me yet again, and less than […]