Books
When someone recommended to Steven Hassan he write a volume called The Cult of Trump, “it just seemed like the most important book I could write, frankly.”
Two recent biographies take very different approaches as they revel in the wild lives and examine the distinctive songs of two of rock music’s most enigmatic figures: Lou Reed and Warren Zevon.
“You can read Frederick Douglass forever and still just encounter new things, new ideas, new passages, new phrases. He’s that kind of writer. It’s like reading Emerson or even Shakespeare.”
Virginie Despentes novel reads like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia mashed with Don Quixote and set in contemporary Paris.
About the post-Reagan era, Boston Phoenix and Boston After Dark editor, Arnie Reisman, observes: “Everything went to sleep, and while we were sleeping, the Republican Party grew six more heads.”
In this book, Naomi Klein shines a light on the path to a politically and economically just model of sustainability.
Michel Layaz’s narrator is juggling much more than nostalgia — his traumas are overwhelmingly odd and disturbing, almost to the point of absurdity.
All told, The Topeka School is engaging — it’s a talented and kaleidoscopic story touching down just about everywhere in modern life.
Experiments With Empire makes some perceptive points about how the connections between ethnology and fiction can help us re-imagine the world.
Literary Appreciation: The Late Harold Bloom — Pursuer of “Difficult Pleasures”
“What is the function of literary criticism in a Disinformation Age? Read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate: that is the art of literary criticism for the present time.” — Harold Bloom
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