Julie Iovine

Critic; Writer; Editor / Architecture / United States / The Wall Street Journal

An Architecture Critic Commits

I look to books for everything imaginable, and unimaginable. They shape my outlook, but also throw open spaces I could never have found on my own. The chance to consider an essential list is wonderfully engrossing, but also a bit of a nasty parlor trick. Must I commit? . . . View the complete text
2 books
Robert Alter

I think of this book together with Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son as it was through Imagined Cities that I came to consider Dickens anew. For once, in describing the wrenching toll of industrialization—specifically constructing the new railroad slashing through neighborhoods—Dickens’s melodramatic writing seems just the thing. Alter goes on to brilliantly explicate carriage traffic in Flaubert as well.

Thomas J. Campanella

The landscape in China is changing so fast that this 2008 report from the front lines is already past tense. But as a record of attitudes held by a just-exploding economy, it couldn’t be more riveting.

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