Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures

Since 1980, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann has also been a prolific reviewer, and his widely published critical writings encompass a broad range of novels, poems, paintings, plays and movies. Behind the Lines brings together these dispatches from the fields of literature and art, and also includes pieces on writers such as Wallace Stevens, Thomas Bernhard, and Paul Bowles, and artists and filmmakers ranging from Otto Dix to Andrei Tarkovsky.

Rarely has the critic's labor been carried out with more elan than in these pages. Hofmann's interests as a reader and art lover are diverse, and in candid, omnivorous prose he approaches the work of the writer, the painter, and the auteur with the enthusiasm and insight of the well-informed reader and observer as well as the self-searching curiosity of a poet.