I feel for folks who don’t live in proximity to world-class museums—I really do. Even in my remote little neck of the woods, I’m 40 minutes or less from a few biggies, including MASS MoCA in North Adams. Since I have a strong preference for contemporary art—generally, the more offbeat and provocative, the better—I…

  Rare is a murder mystery that’s less gripping than a psychodrama about a middle-class family. But the whodunit at the center of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You plays a much-lower-key second fiddle to the twists and turns of mixed-race familial relationships, as they evolve—or refuse to—over the decades. Packed with secrets, lies, and…

It’s no easy feat to pull off a vibrant, riveting theatrical performance almost entirely on an office stage set, either in one-way “chats” with a phone receiver or in conversations with a disembodied voice on an intercom. But Ann, a WAM Theatre production playing now through October 28 at Shakespeare & Company, and starring Jayne…

  True crime documentaries are a mixed bag. Some, like Making a Murderer, are journalistically compelling but often dry. A handful, like The Jinx, manage to mix quality reporting with non-cheesy reenactments, plus the twists and turns, not to mention great photography, of the best cinematic storytelling. Many others, however, follow the lurid-and-exploitative footsteps of…

  Jacob’s Pillow, with its storied history of bringing classical and contemporary dance to both art lovers and mainstream audiences, seems like an unusual venue for Aussie artist Nicola Gunn’s Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster. More performance art or theatrical experience than dance performance, Piece for Person is a dynamic, subversive, often hilarious look…

  New York Times bestseller and multiaward-winning YA novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is heading to movie theaters this fall. With unarmed black youth continuing to die at the hands of police officers, the conversation it sparks couldn’t be timelier, even if the book never quite makes the artistic statement it aspires…

    “I would have to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living,” writes Paul Kalanithi in the 2015 Pulitzer-shortlisted When Breath Becomes Air. As short and memorable as his own life, Kalanithi’s memoir is…

      Samuel and Loo Hawley, the father-daughter protagonists of Hannah Tinti’s Edgar-nominated drama-suspense novel The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley continue the modern tradition of the antihero—intensely flawed characters who make wrong decisions, and plenty of them, and who can often be deeply unlikeable, but whom we root for anyway. In Samuel’s case,…

  “I am my mother’s fourth child and my father’s thirty-ninth.”   Over the past couple of decades, memoirs have gone in flashier, more attention-grabbing directions. But few have the quiet impact of this opening, from Ruth Wariner’s 2016 contemplative memoir The Sound of Gravel. While uneven, Wariner’s book is a worthy entry into an…

  Ask Melissa Auf der Maur about her inspiration for founding Basilica Hudson, an eclectic multidisciplinary arts and events center in Hudson, New York, and she deadpans, “The building made us do it.” The structure in question: a 7,000-square-foot circa-1880 forge and foundry bordered by the Hudson riverfront and views of the Catskills. In 2010, Auf…