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  • Craft and Criticism
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Musical Storytelling: Librettist Gene Scheer On Transforming Novels Into Operas

Musical Storytelling: Librettist Gene Scheer On Transforming Novels Into Operas

Viviana Freyer Shares a Look Inside Two Current and Upcoming Literary Adaptations For the Stage

By Viviana Freyer | March 17, 2025

How Chinese and Italian Opera Helped Her Write and Grieve

How Chinese and Italian Opera Helped Her Write and Grieve

Liu Hong on Navigating Tragedy in Art and Life

By Liu Hong | September 23, 2024

How Sissieretta Jones, Celebrated Black Opera Singer, Enshrined Her Own Story

How Sissieretta Jones, Celebrated Black Opera Singer, Enshrined Her Own Story

Rosalyn Story on Discovering Jones' Personal Scrapbook

By Rosalyn Story | May 2, 2022

“I Trust Nothing But Music.” Valzhyna Mort on the Patient Listening of Writing Poetry

“I Trust Nothing But Music.” Valzhyna Mort on the Patient Listening of Writing Poetry

The Author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected in Conversation with Michael Prior

By Michael Prior | April 13, 2022

On Opera’s Indisputable Rules of Gravity

On Opera’s Indisputable Rules of Gravity

Matthew Aucoin Considers the Constraints and Liberation of an Art Form

By Matthew Aucoin | December 9, 2021

How Opera Invented the Modern Fan

How Opera Invented the Modern Fan

Alison Kinney Investigates the Barriers to Appreciating Art the “Right” Way

By Alison Kinney | October 14, 2021

Best Reviewed
Books of the Week

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  • Bad Bad Girl
  • The Ten Year Affair
  • Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
  • Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
  • Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

A World Outside Time: Pico Iyer on the Deep Pleasure of Handel’s Chorale Music

By Pico Iyer | September 29, 2021

Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You is becoming an opera.

By Walker Caplan | July 26, 2021

Why Opera Will Never Die

By Paul Morley | November 11, 2020

Yuval Sharon and Cannupa Hanska Luger on the Future of Opera

Yuval Sharon and Cannupa Hanska Luger on the Future of Opera

From the Quarantine Tapes Podcast with Paul Holdengraber

By The Quarantine Tapes | September 15, 2020

The Newly Resonant Lessons of an Unlikely Broadway Musical

The Newly Resonant Lessons of an Unlikely Broadway Musical

Anthony Rudel on Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's Adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country

By Anthony Rudel | July 27, 2020

Freddie Mercury Was a Total Opera Fanboy

Freddie Mercury Was a Total Opera Fanboy

Late in His Life, He Teamed Up with One of Opera's Biggest Stars

By Alfonso Casas | June 4, 2020

The Time Giuseppe Verdi Battled *Actual* Censorship

The Time Giuseppe Verdi Battled *Actual* Censorship

On Italian Radicals Who Fought For Freedom

By Wallis Wilde-Menozzi | April 3, 2020

How Wagner Tried to Revolutionize Art and End Capitalism

How Wagner Tried to Revolutionize Art and End Capitalism

Simon Callow on a Great Composer Getting Political

By Simon Callow | February 7, 2018

Temple of the Scapegoat

Temple of the Scapegoat

Alexander Kluge, Trans. by Isabel Cole, Donna Stonecipher, and Martin Chalmers

By Lit Hub Excerpts | January 23, 2018

In California, Visions of Defiance and Grace

In California, Visions of Defiance and Grace

Finding Political Inspiration in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Opera

By Veronica Esposito | January 22, 2018

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    • To Break Up with Friends, or to Murder Them: 5 Novels Featuring Fatal Friendship FailingsNovember 4, 2025 by Jenna Satterthwaite
    • The Trauma Behind the "Good Old Days": Christina Henry on the Dark Trap of Nostalgia in FictionNovember 4, 2025 by Christina Henry
    • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
    • The Best Reviewed Books of the Week
    • "Not much happens In fact there is much in the text that is not made…"
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