Franklin Nelson

Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?

From our UK edition

Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980 track by the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat: We have to be reasonable You can’t go on living like this Alone if you fell sick We would be so worried You’ll see, you’ll be happy there

Rembrandt’s print revolution

From our UK edition

Rembrandt was ‘largely self-taught as a printmaker’, according to Epco Runia, head of collections at Rembrandt House Museum. ‘[He] learned by looking at examples and simply trying things out,’ Runia writes in the guide that accompanies this fine show (which will travel to Charleston in October and Cincinnati next winter). Etching had only been around

Things Fall Apart: Flesh, by David Szalay, reviewed

From our UK edition

London and the South East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is, Turbulence – the titles of David Szalay’s first five novels, which won a flurry of prizes, are all captured, in a sense, by Flesh, his sixth. Much of the latest book is set in Britain’s capital, and the innocent frequently lose that tag

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

From our UK edition

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might