Dec 31, 2022

Like Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett, this novelist—In the Distance, Trust— writes in a language other than the one he spoke as a child, and it helps him see the world afresh: “If you move out of one language and into another, it is like moving out of one country and into another.” A conversation at Rizzoli...

Dec 10, 2022

When he was in college, he met Duke Ellington. “I was a freshman with a huge afro, an Angela Davis afro, and he pointed at me across the room and said, ‘You must be a musician.’” Thus anointed, he went on to compose operas including X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central...

Dec 3, 2022

This terrific bass-baritone likes white orchids in his dressing room. They’re beautiful and ephemeral, like—oh, I don’t know—music? Now everything seems like a metaphor. “Everything is a metaphor,” he says. The joys and jolts of a person of color in the world of classical music.