Month: September 2008
by Bill Marx “If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.” Rushdie’s piggybacked history of the hemisphere’s premier intellectual ironists is correct but, at least until the last decade or so, Machado…
Read MoreBreyten Breytenbach at this year’s Brooklyn Book Fair By Bill Marx On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to South African writer, painter, and human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach about his recently published book of mordantly fantastic fables “All One Horse.” In America, Breytenbach is known, if at all, for his four highly unconventional…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx A scene from the world premiere production of Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian’s “Of Mountains and Seas.” “Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts” By Gao Xingjian. Translated from the Chinese by Gilbert C.F. Fong The Chinese University Press, distributed by Columbia University Press Filled with wise-cracking mythological…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx “The Boys of Winter” Written by Barry Brodsky, Eric Small and Dean B. Kaner. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by BKS Productions at Boston Playwrights Theatre, Boston, MA, through September 21. John Greiner-Ferris as the disgruntled vet in “The Boys of Winter” In his superb new essay collection “Writing in the…
Read Moreby Bill Marx The newspaper “Haaretz” recently reported that the family of George Khoury, an Israeli Arab student killed in a 2004 terrorist attack in Jerusalem, responded to his death with a generous gesture – it has helped finance a translation into Arabic of Israeli writer Amos Oz’s powerful 2003 memoir A Tale of Love…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Some plays are so long that they drive people to despair. In the standard theatrical canon the palm goes to Goethe’s “Faust,” Part I of which runs 4612 lines, and Part II takes the total to 12,111 lines. Next comes Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” The playwright did not intend this to be staged…
Read MoreAnother neglected master from New Zealand — writer C.K. Stead by Bill Marx I just noticed that a week before Janet Frame’s previously unpublished story “Gorse is not People” appeared in “The New Yorker” the magazine published a poem by another fine New Zealand author, C.K. Stead. He not only knew Frame at the time…
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