Mervyn Peake wrote:  "For drawing should be an attempt to hold back from the brink of oblivion some fleeting line or rhythm, som...

Heidi Julavits , the novelist and co-founding editor of The Believer , reviewing in this week's New York Times Book Review   Glen Duncan...

In May, the New York Times published an article entitled "On the Vaunted City Subway Map, Mistakes and Phantom Blocks" which reve...

Adoration of the Shepherds ( El Greco , 1614, originally in Toledo, now at the Prado). Of this painting, the eminent historian John Hal...

A short video shot in Brooklyn last year by Matthew Mehlan that celebrates the spirit of the U.S.A.

We traverse the streets and lanes of our commonplace books, strolling like Benjamin through the arcades, wandering like Woolf through notes ...

Ellen Dissanayake has been saying very wise things for decades about why we humans make art. As I stir my coffee this morning and contempl...

Fantastical motifs flourish everywhere in our contemporary field of vision: a steady return to the images we conjured around the first...

Pam Grossman has curated yet another fabulous show, this one focused on the sigils and signs that illuminate our various paths to enlight...

"And Vulcan answered, 'Take heart, and be no more disquieted about this matter; would that I could hide him from death's sight ...

Like millions of others mourning the death of Maurice Sendak , I recall as some of my earliest memories the images from Wild Things and rem...

Ridley Scott's Prometheus hits the screens June 8th--a prequel-of-sorts to the Alien movies. Lobster & Canary loves the fac...

A Lobster & Canary reader reminded me the other day that we failed to note the passage of Moebius , one of the most influential arti...

Brian Stableford , in his indispensable The A to Z of Fantasy Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2009), asserts: "Literary experimentation...

In honor of poetry month (and to swim with the swift stream of poetry in every month), I recommend The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems In ...

Several decades ago, I watched a Green Heron hunting in a half-strangled stream --dwindled to a thread at the bottom of a drainage ditch-- m...

Two quotes struck the lobster and canary this week: "As museums continue building mobile devices into more exhibits--the Museum of Fi...

"When I look back at the history of Hauser & Wirth over the past 17 years, I notice a pattern—we have almost always opened our gall...

---Carnival revelers in Lucerne, Switzerland, February 16th of this year. So another Mardi Gras has come and gone. ---Carniv...

John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in "My Debt to Ireland" (in this morning's New York Times Sunday Magazine ) about searching for...

Dan Beachy-Quick ... Nicole Kornher-Stace ... Sonya Taaffe ... Three writers, ranging in age from 29 to 39, who have moved beyond the ...

A passage in The Hobbit that I have been musing over, the one describing Bilbo's reaction at first seeing Smaug slumbering atop the tre...

The lobster and the canary share with you seven new (or at least new-ish) songs that we find ourselves listening to frequently at the moment...

Lobster & Canary welcomes the new year by celebrating the work of Helen Frankenthaler , who died December 27th at age 83. For an esp...

-- Melora Griffis , empty room (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper). --Griffis, blue sun (2010; acrylic, gouache, past...