Hiding in Plain Sight: The Life of Katherine Mansfield

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press)

“Books are the mirrors of the soul. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about other people.”

—Virginia Woolf

“I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s familiar real life, to find the treasure in that.”

—Katherine Mansfield

I will readily admit that I was woefully late in coming to the awareness that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were remarkably experimental in the manner and mode with which they assumed an ascendency among the most prominent and important members of the literary modernist canon of the 20th century. I suppose I fell under the sway of louder modernists (for lack of a better word) such as rabble-rousers like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. But Woolf and especially Mansfield were far quieter modernists, though they shook up the stylistic status quo with equal fervour and daring aplomb. It didn’t help her status that Mansfield concentrated almost exclusively on the short story, or that she died painfully young, thirty-four, of tuberculosis in 1923, just as modernism itself was building up its full head of steam. So I’m delighted to report that Gerri Kimber’s new biography of Mansfield, called A Hidden Life, released by Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, manages to correct an abundance of gaps in our appreciation of just who she was and what she accomplished in her sad but turbulent life.

Grief and The Goshawk: H Is for Hawk and Other Recent Movies

Claire Foy in H Is for Hawk. (Photo: Roadside Pictures.)

Among the books I brought with me on a trip at the end of my semester break this year was a lovely recent memoir called Raising Hare in which the author, Claire Dalton, who has grown up with the principle that human beings should never interfere with the workings of the wild, chronicles the discovery of a leveret on her land, close to death. Despite her predilections, Dalton makes the decision to try to save the young hare’s life and then, instinctually, begins to share her home – exterior and interior – with this creature with which she’s fallen in love, redesigning it to accommodate its needs and comforts.

Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

Urgency and Grace: The National Ballet’s Flight Pattern and Suite en blanc

The National Ballet of Canada company in Flight Pattern. (Photo: Ted Belton.)

The National Ballet of Canada opens its 2026 winter season with a study in contrast — the searing humanism of Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc, here staged to radiant precision by former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Charles Jude. Together they form a dialogue across eras: one confronting the fractures of our contemporary world, the other reaffirming ballet’s formal beauty and historical resilience.

More from Criterion: His Girl Friday

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

The complicated saga of the funniest comedy ever written by Americans began in 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page opened on Broadway. It’s a newspaper play, an especially flavorful version of the hard-boiled comedy, a genre that flourished in the Roaring Twenties. (The other signature samples are the war play What Price Glory? from 1924 by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings; Chicago, set mostly in Cook Country Jail, from 1926; and Once in a Lifetime from 1930 by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, a burlesque of Hollywood’s rocky passage from silent movies to talkies. Chicago, of course, got new life as a Broadway musical nearly half a century after Maurine Watkins wrote the original version.) In The Front Page, the best reporter in Chicago, Hildy Johnson, quits his job – and his sly, manipulative editor, Walter Burns – to get married, move to New York and launch himself into a less disreputable career. But he never gets there because on his way out he gets embroiled in a sensational story about a convicted murderer who escapes from his jail on the eve of his hanging due to the incompetence of the sheriff, who has also colluded in the burying of his reprieve from the governor. This is prime hard-boiled comedy: the press corps may be expert fabricators, but the forces of law and order and the local government are truly corrupt. At the end Hildy realizes what we – and Walter – knew all along: that he’s a reporter to the bone. Plus Burns whips up one final trick to keep him from leaving, prompting one of the most memorable curtain lines in Broadway history.

Iconophilia: Perpetual Morphosis

(Zone Books, Princeton University Press.)

“Unframedness. Presentness. Immediateness. It is under these three titles — intimately related — that we now experience the image by means of those devices that constitute image-making strategies: virtual immersive environments.”

Andrea Pinotti

The title of this breathtakingly insightful book by Andrea Pinotti, At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality, should be taken quite literally. Consider it what rightly amounts to a veritable biography of the Image: its history, both overt and covert in all our lives, and as both a secret story communally shared and also an unimaginable one taunting us to keep going towards what used to be called the future. The book’s image-archive extends from a time long before any recorded history even existed, right through to a time after which history, at least as we once regarded it, may also have vanished. And perhaps owing to the sheer acceleration and amplification of our lives, the future of the real and recognizable image itself might even have ceased to exist at all. The most succinct and accurate synopsis of At the Threshold of the Image is equally breathless: this is an exploration of the impact of immersive experiences on visual practices from cave painting to virtual reality.

Dance You Want to Know: Small Screens, Post‑Pandemic Stages and the Pull of the Crowd

A still from CDK Company's dance video, Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I’ve been noticing something. It started, as these things often do now, on my phone. One of my favourite pop laments, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, kept resurfacing not as a song, but as a dance: a viral clip of dozens of young bodies in retro office‑casual dress, swirling and lunging in tight formation across a pastel‑toned courtyard. The choreography by Netherlands-based CDK Company was sharp but not presentational, massed yet curiously intimate, as if a crowd scene from an old Hollywood musical had slipped into 2020s streetwear and discovered contemporary release technique. I watched it over and over, wondering: what am I looking at here? A music video? A fashion film? A new kind of ensemble dance built for the camera rather than the stage?