Books

Book Review: “I Give You My Silence” is Vargas Llosa’s Final, Gentle Vals — A Swan Song of Art’s Quiet Power

February 24, 2026
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Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel is a sweet, light story about art and idealism—and its ever-present opposite, cynicism.

Book Review: Steven Underwood on the New Black Digital Renaissance — and Who Profits from It

February 21, 2026
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What you’ll think of this book will likely rest on what you make of the writer’s definition of Black digital Art.

Book Review: The Look of the Sound — The Album Art of Prestige Records

February 19, 2026
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Along with its slew of images — photos, sketches, and ephemera as well as album covers — WAIL offers what amounts to a compelling oral history of the mid-century explosion, not only of recorded jazz but of graphic design and, by extension, a burgeoning New York cultural scene.

Poetry Review: The Art of Letting Go — Gail Mazur’s “World on a String”

February 18, 2026
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The poems in :World on a String” set an example for us all of how to live, to love, to release, and to remember.

Book Review: “The Copywriter” — Of Proust, Pandas, and Poetic Inertia

February 18, 2026
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What stands out for this reader is the humor Daniel Poppick mines from the quotidian.

Poetry Review: “Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters” — Song of Pain and Praise

February 17, 2026
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Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung’s goal — achieved through tag-team lyric utterance — is a noble spirituality.

Book Review: “Sixties Surreal” — A Jingle-Jangle of an Alternative Take

February 16, 2026
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While I heartily recommend “Sixties Surreal” as a provocative revisionist compendium or almanac, I know the volume will frustrate those who expect to find a conventional survey.

Book Review: “When Caesar Was King” — How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy

February 16, 2026
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The book argues, convincingly, that Sid Caesar’s genius wasn’t in what he did or said so much as in the anarchistic energy he encouraged his writers to unleash and harness.

Book Review: A Writer’s Life Reconsidered — Paule Marshall’s Artistry and Influence

February 14, 2026
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Mary Helen Washington’s biography of Paule Marshall provides a thorough consideration of the writer’s achievement and a convincing case that her fiction and her public speeches deserve continuing attention and respect.

Book Review: Spotlight on Rock’s Backbone: The “Backbeats” of 15 Drummers

February 13, 2026
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Backbeats is a detailed and informative story. Each profile functions as an entry point into a selective but substantial survey of roughly seventy-five years of rock history.

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