Kai Maristed
Come for the frolic and high energy professional stagecraft; stay to experience this creative ensemble’s answer to: Who the hell are we, facing the end?
“Dealing With the Dead” achieves something else no outsider, however gifted or knowledgeable, could pull off: showing how magic, superstition, religious faith and credulity (as in, a hunger to believe) play into the everyday lives of most Pointe-Noireans.
A consistently engaging and engaged, insightful, humorous, scarily moving, polished contemporary drama with a premise to die for.
“The Endless Week” is a brave, uneven, at times brilliant swathe of prose. Experimental? For certain. Perhaps the only way to write an Internet novel is by looking from the inside out.
“Darkenbloom” is a hefty novel, in which a blood-stained, depraved swath of history is laid bare by in-depth examination of a narrow geographical sample (think “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, or, for that matter, “Gone With the Wind”).
Bruna Dantas Lobato’s sensibility is unmistakably original: she explores her protagonist’s life and surroundings like a dowsing rod, poking into closets, corners, and cupboards.
Rachel Kushner’s latest novel is mélange of vignettes, stand-alone or linked flash essays, and portentous bits of wisdom.
What could have gone terribly wrong goes terrifically right in the hands of this creative team, culminating in a convergence of the life, the oeuvre, and our protagonist’s encroaching agony.
What sets “Cold Nights of Childhood “wonderfully apart from today’s autofiction genre is the narrator’s absolute lack of self-pity. There is no blame-game, and no lugubrious victimhood.
One wonders sometimes whether the weight of acclaim doesn’t place an author beyond critical reproach. The bandwagon effect.
Arts Commentary: These Goosesteps Don’t Lie — Shakira in El Salvador and the “New Security” Aesthetic