Books

Book Review: A Biography of T.S. Eliot — Before, During, and After “The Waste Land”

July 7, 2015
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In this excellent biography, Robert Crawford succeeds admirably in detailing T.S. Eliot’s early intellectual development.

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Book Review: “Adrift” in a Memorably Neo-Beat World

July 5, 2015
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The protagonist’s version of barroom existentialism works as an unofficial précis for the struggle to make it through another day of being human.

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Book Review: “Look Who’s Back” — The Second Coming

July 1, 2015
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The writing in this novel depends on winks and nods. You’re invited to be in on a big joke, assuming it is one.

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Book Review: “Twelve-Cent Archie” — A Highly Entertaining Look at the Teens of Riverdale

June 17, 2015
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What makes Twelve-Cent Archie such a congenial read is that Bart Beaty is a free thinker about comic books.

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Poetry Review: Restoring the “Old Questions” — Klaus Merz’s “Out of the Dust”

June 16, 2015
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Poet Klaus Merz wields his deceptively simple diction in order to pry open hidden secrets: what we leave unsaid, what we neglect, avoid.

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Fuse Book Review: “The Book of Beginnings” — Vive les indifférences!

June 8, 2015
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This study is an attempt to “enter” a foreign way of thought and to study the “possibilities” and, by extension, “potential mindsets” of the human mind.

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Book Review: A Classic of Cinematic Fiction — “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty”

June 2, 2015
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What if Alfred Hitchcock had sat out behind his Holmby Hills bungalow, smoking clove cigarettes and writing chick-lit novels?

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Book Review: Artist Mark Rothko — The Painter as Guru

May 31, 2015
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Biographer Annie Cohen-Solal is perhaps strongest on one thread of Mark Rothko’s narrative: his experience as a Jewish immigrant.

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Book Review: The Sad Tenderness of Patrick Modiano’s “Dora Bruder”

May 30, 2015
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Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano understands that time periods can mesh, interpenetrate, layer up, blend, and blur naturally in the mind.

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Book Review: No “Odd Woman” Out — Vivian Gornick’s Richly Engaging Memoir

May 28, 2015
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Author Vivian Gornick’s discontent is foundational, fertile, unquenchable, except by writing, and quite often funny.

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