2 Books From Other Shores

Dear readers, I’m not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let’s say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the … Read more

A Painter Whose Work Is Never Finished

The day before Janiva Ellis’s exhibition opened in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 31, most of her paintings weren’t done. Most of them still aren’t. In fact, that’s intentional: The 14 pieces gathered for “Fear Corroded Ape,” on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through April 6, had been knocking around her studio … Read more

Raised in a Civil War, He Makes Games to Bring People Together

Within a modern but nondescript building a few hundred feet from Stockholm’s pretty Riddarfjarden Bay, a frosted glass wall in Josef Fares’s office displays etched characters from It Takes Two, his video game studio’s “Toy Story”-esque cooperative adventure about an adult couple’s broken relationship. Near his desk, in a lighted case, sits a pair of … Read more