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    Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89

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    An architect, he wrote in his book “Lost New York” about the many buildings that were destroyed before passage of the city’s landmarks preservation law.Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, “Lost New York,” offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89.His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.Mr. Silver’s book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University’s architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city’s long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed.“By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,” he wrote. “It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera” — it was destroyed in 1967 — “and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.”He added, “While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.”He found images in archives of “first-rate architecture” that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; the art collector Richard Canfield’s gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Teenage Soldier’s Wartime Scrapbook Inspired His Granddaughter’s First Novel

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      Heather Clark’s debut novel, “The Scrapbook,” considers young love as buffeted by historical ruptures.To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.A photograph from Bud Clark’s scrapbook shows an Army buddy taking in the view of a French harbor from atop a river barge.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Match These Books to Their Movie Versions

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. With the summer-movie season here, this week’s challenge is focused on novels that went on to become big-screeen adventures. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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      How Many Memorable Lines Can You Match Up With Their Novels?

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      Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that challenges you to match a book’s memorable lines with its title. This week’s installment is focused on quotations from books that are about books, stories, reading and writing. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books themselves if you want to get a copy and see that quotation in context. More

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      Jesus Has ‘More to Say Than Any Human Language Can Carry’: A Q&A With Rowan Williams

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      Rowan Williams is among the most important religious thinkers in the world. A theologian, poet, playwright and literary critic, he served as the archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. I spoke to Dr. Williams about his journey of faith and doubt, why God allows the innocent to suffer and how to interpret the Bible (and how not to). He talked about the New Atheists and the influence on his theology of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, what makes Jesus such a compelling figure and what it means to pastor people through grief. Dr. Williams also talked about how, for him, the Christian faith is “the perspective that enriches.” Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the third in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.1. Dostoyevsky Led the WayPeter Wehner: Let me start out by asking you to describe your journey of faith. As a young adult, what was the pull toward Christianity for you? Was it primarily intellectual or aesthetic or an appeal to the imagination or some combination of those? Did you experience what C.S. Lewis called “Sehnsucht,” an intense longing and divine spark for something that’s unattainable in this material world?Rowan Williams: I’d grown up in a Christian environment but not a very intense one. It was really when I was a teenager that it began to speak to me, and it did so largely, to pick up your categories, at the imaginative level. It felt like a larger world to inhabit and at a time when I was discovering more and more about the literary world, about philosophical questioning, about the historical roots of our culture.All of that seemed to me, as a student, enriching and exciting. But it was also brought alive — and here was my good fortune — through particular people who were very important to me at the time, especially my parish priest, who was a huge influence — encouraging, supportive, giving me the message all the time that there’s room for all that in the life of faith.When I started as a university student — coming into contact with an awareness of human need and human suffering that I hadn’t quite registered before, meeting homeless people when I was a student in Cambridge, the sense that you needed to have quite a capacious picture of human nature in order to see the dignity and the need — that reinforced my feeling that the faith I’d grown into was something which actually allowed you to engage at depth with people.Wehner: Is the draw of faith for you now essentially what it was when you were younger?Williams: It’s probably pretty much what I grew up in, in many ways, which is not to say it’s not changed or developed. It’s certainly been battered and tested in various ways. But when I go back to what I was learning at that time, it’s still that same sense that this is the perspective that enriches. This is the perspective that enlarges.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Books on Navigating Family

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      Researchers share the titles they recommend most often.When parents estranged from their children share what’s going on, many imagine other people thinking, “What’s wrong with you?” said Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University.Though estrangement — or family cutoff — can feel isolating, it’s actually fairly common. A 2022 YouGov poll of Americans found that 29 percent of subjects were estranged from a parent, grandparent, sibling or child.People experiencing estrangement often crave tools to deal with the loss and assurance that they aren’t alone — and a number of recent books may help make sense of what they’re going through.We asked nine experts who research the topic for recommendations. Because the field is still growing, many of them endorsed the same books. And several experts interviewed for this article appear on this list because their work was highly recommended by colleagues.The five titles below offer guidance on navigating family rifts, coping with pain and finding a path forward. But they won’t necessarily help mend broken ties.As Kathleen Smith, a therapist and faculty member at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in Washington, D.C., put it, “the goal is not to prevent estrangement or encourage it, but to help a person get their best thinking involved in the decision.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Club: Read ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ by Virginia Woolf, with the Book Review

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      In June, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s classic novel about one day in the life of an London woman in 1923.Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read “The Safekeep,” by Yael van der Wouden. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on “Playworld,” “We Do Not Part” and “Orbital.”)It’s a beloved opening line from a beloved book: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.”The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That’s pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa’s roving thoughts. Over the course of just a few hours, we see her grapple with social pressures, love, family, the trauma of war and more. The result is a groundbreaking portrayal of consciousness and a poetic look at what it means to be alive.This year, the novel turns 100 years old.To celebrate the book’s centennial, in June, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf. We’ll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on June 27, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by June 19, and we may mention your observations in the episode.Here’s some related reading to get you started.Our original 1925 review of “Mrs. Dalloway”: “Mrs. Woolf is eminently among those who ‘kindle and illuminate.’ Mrs. Woolf has set free a new clarity of thought and rendered possible a more precise and more evocative agglutination of complicated ideas in simplicity of expression.” Read the full review here.This essay by the author Michael Cunningham (whose book “The Hours” is a riff on “Mrs. Dalloway”) about Virginia Woolf’s literary revolution: “Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA.” Read the full essay here.The writer Ben Libman’s essay, “Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?”, in which he discusses Virginia Woolf and a host of other modernist writers: “She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and later, in a more extreme sense, in ‘The Waves’ (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo.” Read the full essay here.We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading! More

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      New Romance Novels Brimming With Unhinged Wish Fulfillment

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      The Witch of Wall Streetby M.J. EtkindIn a subgenre known for its small towns, THE WITCH OF WALL STREET (Self-published, ebook, $5.99) shoots above the crowd like a skyscraper. Miriam Blum, an investment banker, and Nelson Copperfield, a nonprofit C.E.O., are witches and opposing bidders in a major Manhattan real estate deal. They’re also high school rivals, since Nelson often had to rescue Miriam from the snarls caused by her chaos magic. She’s learned to control her power, she’s fought her way up in the financial world and she’s not about to let some smug do-gooder get one over on her now.But he’s grown hotter since high school, so she might take him home with her, just once. This ill-advised hookup turns disastrous when Miriam’s chaos magic scatters their enchanted possessions across the city, forcing them on a quest through the supernatural nooks and crannies of New York. It’s refreshing to see magic as just one more subcultural layer woven through the texture of the city (and I would perish at the magical dim sum place with no regrets).Also refreshing: Miriam is a bit villainous and knows it, which I always appreciate in a heroine. Etkind’s book is not so much about choosing pure good versus pure evil, but rather about how to create opportunities for doing good in a world full of shades of gray.Along Came Amorby Alexis DariaThe need to upend the status quo is also a theme in ALONG CAME AMOR (Avon, 512 pp., paperback, $18.99), the third and final volume in Daria’s gloriously angst-saturated Primas of Power series. You’ll be fine starting with this volume, but the trilogy as a whole is well worth the time; these three books have more concentrated pining than an Austen movie marathon on a rainy afternoon.Ava Rodriguez is fresh off a painful divorce a lot of her family members blame her for. So when a chance encounter leads to one night with a sexy hotel C.E.O. — and then another, and another — she doesn’t see the need to tell any of her friends or relatives about it. All she wants is one thing in her life she can enjoy without anyone peevishly asking how long until she screws this up, too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can You Match These Canadian Novels to Their Locations?

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      A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights novels with settings in Canada. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading. More