A supple, evocative novel that meditates on family and loss and art.
Books
Book Review: “Hollywood Babylon II” Revisited
Hollywood Babylon II is almost as addictive, seductive, compulsively page-turning as its inglorious Hollywood Babylon predecessor..
Book Review: Why Listening to Community Voices Could Help Revive Local News
If a new generation of community news organizations is to grow and thrive, then we need a renewed sense of civic engagement. And in order to foster that civic engagement, we need journalism that doesn’t just report the news but also listens and collaborates.
Author Remembrance: Writer Pete Hamill — Sane, Liberal, and Literate
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it’s not journalism.
Book Review: “The Boy in the Field” — A Brilliant Coming-of-Age Fable
The Boy in the Field is the latest novel from Margot Livesey, a prolific writer with a keen eye for the interiority of her characters, a skill that enriches her novels with a rare intimacy and immediacy.
Book Review: “Chasing the Light” — The Agitated Life of Oliver Stone
Filmmaker Oliver Stone’s memoir is an exhilarating primer for anyone who wants to understand his reputation as a writer and director.
Book Review: “Pew” — Someone Truly Out of This World
In no way a ‘tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’, Pew is instead a kind of reverie, a wide-eyed spin on the Southern novel.
Book Review: “The Atomic Bomb on My Back” — Witness to Apocalypse
Reading Sumiteru Taniguchi’s book brought back my memories of meeting a man who had witnessed the unimaginable.
Book Review: “Great Demon Kings” — A Comet Circling Gas Giants
John Giorno was in the vanguard of what later became the herd: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Warhol, Buddhism, Burroughs, enlightenment, spiritual quests to India, unfettered sex, wild poetry, new technology, experimental forms of expression, queer politics, pot, speed, LSD — all the household bric-a-brac of the counterculture.
Book Review: “Lake of Urine: A Love Story” — Breaking Established Reality
It’s hard to critique a novel that flies under such a resplendent banner, a wholesale rejection of the dead and decaying world of trends and war and meaninglessness.