We now have a book that virtually closes the circle on Hemingway’s women, a biography that will be treasured by the author’s fans and scholars.
Book Review: “Letters to Camondo” — An Essential Testament to Jewish Memory and History
This is an extraordinarily beautiful book, its present tense prose creating “an atmosphere of literature,” in Virginia Woolf’s words, its honest probing as illuminating as anything you will read about what it means to be Jewish.
Book Review: Elizabeth Warren and Alexander S. Vindman — Gifted with a Moral Compass
The idea of America is elusive and sometimes, like right now, in danger of disappearing. That is why I have found myself turning for comfort to two books that can give us some perspective as to how to move forward.
Documentary Review: PBS’s “Hemingway” — Inside an American Legend
If you love fiction you should devote several hours to watching Hemingway. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have brought a special tenderness to this series, something deeper and more compelling than previous Burns documentaries.
Book Review: Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” — Closing the Circle, Perfectly
This is a great work, more linear than Tom Stoppard’s earlier dramas, yet filled with such intelligence and compassion that it will be read and seen for years and years and, perhaps, over time be regarded as his richest, most haunting play.
Book Review: “Renato!” — Novelist Eugene Mirabelli, Creator of Inwardness
What a pleasure it is to revel in this work, which expresses enduring values in such an original way.
Book Review: Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon” — Showing a Path Forward
Although some of Apeirogon is painful, this novel can inspire you to think differently and even to act, which is surely welcome after this horrible year in which we have all felt so helpless.
Book Review: A Brilliant “Homeland Elegies” — Indispensable Witness
What Ayad Akhtar reveals, with stunning detail and a passion and an urgency rarely seen in American fiction, is that his is a story marked by a loneliness similar to that found in Melville, Dreiser, and T.S. Eliot, among others, and that puts him squarely in their company.
Literary Appreciation: D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” at 100
I hope this centennial will inspire readers to immerse themselves in this enormously important, rich, and vibrant work.
Book Review: A.B. Yehoshua’s “The Tunnel” — A Serious Romp about an Aging Brain
Exuberant is the right word for A.B. Yehoshua’s new novel, not only because of the story’s pile up of characters and events, but also for its prose.