Bill Marx
by Bill Marx The Boston Book Festival, which kicks off its existence this Saturday, is an inevitability that for some puzzling reason wasn’t a reality. Boston is a determinedly readerish town, yet it is the only one of America’s major cities that doesn’t have a book festival. Thankfully, BBF organizer Deborah Z. Porter remedies the…
By Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
The governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
By Bill Marx October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of…
By Bill Marx What are artists? Desperate searchers after whatever can be found of truth and beauty, even when the two may be poles apart. – Tennessee Williams, “Notebooks” (1979) The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Davis Robinson. Beau Jest Moving Theater production (commissioned by the Provincetown Tennessee…
Observe the ass … his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals. — Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson” The Donkey Show Conceived by Randy Weiner. Directed by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner. Presented by the American Repertory Theater at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA Presented by American Repertory Theater,…
by Bill Marx Instead of a critique for World Books this past week I finished up a review of Australian writer Kate Grenville’s historical novel “The Lieutenant” for the “Los Angeles Times.” This is a well-written, well-meaning study of understanding between colonized and colonizers in the 18th century Australia; the emphasis is on the experiences…
In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning of a real civilization. – George Bernard Shaw, “The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles,” preface, 1936. Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Gus Kaikkonen. Presented by The…
By Bill Marx Veteran “Village Voice” theater critic Michael Feingold has written a good column on the tragic news, for some, that the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, the organizations that jointly manage Broadway’s annual Tony Awards, have decided to remove the first-night theater press from the ranks of Tony voters. Some hand-wringers…
By Bill Marx The ruckus kicked up by Yale University Press’s refusal to include cartoons offensive to some Muslims in a forthcoming book called “The Cartoons that Shook the World” underlines the ironic difference between offensive words and images. (Perhaps Yale U Press should re-title the censored version of the book “The Cartoons That Only…
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