Books
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.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone’s memoir is an exhilarating primer for anyone who wants to understand his reputation as a writer and director.
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.
Reading Sumiteru Taniguchi’s book brought back my memories of meeting a man who had witnessed the unimaginable.
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.
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.
“Ornette was looking for those notes, the ones that feel no pain.”
Ah, Florida, “the grease trap under America’s George Foreman Grill”: not just “weird America,” also “impending America.”
Twilight of Democracy made me yearn (uncharacteristically) for hard scientific data to supplement Anne Applebaum’s punditry about the pundits.
Practical handbook, compendium of theory, or history of an American tradition? A little of each… but enough of any?
Arts Remembrance: Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s ‘Saxophone Colossus,’ Dies at 95