Roberta Silman

Book Review: An Outstanding “List”

November 30, 2011
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Although he has set himself an ambitious task with all that is happening in “The List,” Martin Fletcher has complete command of this material and has created a complex novel that is also a good thriller.

Book Review: Brilliant “Shards”

November 1, 2011
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In this novel, author Ismet Prcic’s confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in the story.

Book Review: A Memoir That Gives Solace to Us All

September 11, 2011
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A best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.

Book Commentary: The Emperor of Lies = The Emperor’s New Clothes?

September 6, 2011
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Should we fictionalize the Holocaust? This is not only a literary question, but a moral one as well, issues raised by the publication of the translation of “The Emperor of Lies,” a novel about the ways in which the Jews in the Lodz ghetto struggled to survive the Nazis.

Classical Music Feature: What a Way to Start the Week!

July 16, 2011
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For those who imagine Tanglewood only as concerts in the huge shed which seats 6,000, these Sunday morning concerts offer a more intimate experience as well as a chance to hear modern pieces they never would hear in what we all call the “regular concert fare,”

Book Review: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — Updated

June 5, 2011
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Most great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.

Book Review: A Puzzling Look at the West, Islam, and The Convert

May 21, 2011
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If you are going to write about this very charged subject, the West and Islam, why would you choose as a representative of that great and ancient culture a woman who is stunted emotionally, clearly unreliable, and probably mentally unstable?

Fuse News: Kermit Moyer wins the 2011 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction

April 8, 2011
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One of the mandates of the Winship Prize is that it be by a New Englander or set in New England. Moyer is a retired Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at American University who now lives in Eastham on the Cape where he has been writing full time for several years.

Book Review: Exploring “The Memory of Love” in postwar Sierra Leone

March 17, 2011
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In her second novel, Aminatta Forna gives us a moving story of the toll that the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone has taken and is still taking, years after it supposedly ended.

Book Review: Two Old Men Singing of Wisdom

February 8, 2011
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These novels by the young, Indian writers Natacha Appanah, who identifies herself as French-Mauritian, and Rana Dasgupta take the form of memoirs of old men who look back on their lives, searching for the truth and the peace that comes with an understanding of the past. The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah. Translated from the…

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