Books

Book Review: Donald Antrim’s “The Emerald Light in the Air” — Unabashedly Gorgeous

September 2, 2014
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The Emerald Light in the Air is important reading for those interested in the state of the American short story, or of American fiction in general.

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Book Review: Lucinda Franks’s Memoir – A Deeply Romantic Story of a May-December NYC Power Couple

September 1, 2014
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Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lucinda Franks’s writing can be brilliant, deeply honest, and startling; other times superficial, sentimental, New Agey, or simply not credible.

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Book Review: “Love Made Visible” — A Poignant Memoir About Life With a Boston “Renaissance Man”

August 27, 2014
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We become participants in a chapter of American art history that raises important questions about what fame means, how much a part luck plays, and how we treat our artists. .

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Book Review: “Our Lady of the Nile” — Prefiguring Rwandan Genocide

August 26, 2014
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Because of the national tension between the Tutsis and the Hutus, and its effects on everyday routines in the school, this novel cannot long remain a bemusing tale of adolescent life.

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Poetry Review: Romanian Poet Gellu Naum — Living in the “Blue Crypt under the Night’s Obscure Seal”

August 22, 2014
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Gellu Naum does not use the heterogeneous juxtapositions of surrealism to create something jocular, absurd, prankish, or gratuitously paradoxical.

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Book Review: “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life” — Intimations of a Seminal Thinker’s Aura

August 20, 2014
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The authors have used their research well. Beyond applying an abundance of detail to trace his intellectual growth as well as the trajectory of his emotions, Eiland and Jennings have managed to intimate—though perhaps not to capture—something more elusive: a sense of Benjamin’s aura.

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Fuse Book Review: “The Silkworm” — The Beasts Arrive in a Lather

August 19, 2014
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In this whodunit by Robert Galbraith — the pen name of J.K. Rowling, better known for her Harry Potter books — editors, literary agents and writers play the part of monsters on the loose.

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Book Review: “Do Not Sell at Any Price” — A Delightful Book on Those Who Collect Vintage 78 rpm Records

August 15, 2014
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I like to believe that I’m not loony, that, unlike certain 78 collectors profiled by Amanda Petrusich, I have a perspective on all this.

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Book Review: The Absurdity of Living in the Space Between — “Elsewhere” by Doron Rabinovici

August 7, 2014
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Elsewhere is a tragicomic work, its plethora of absurd coincidences an attempt to portray the senseless plight of the post-postmodern man.

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Book Review: An Evocative Biography of Zionist Agitator and Writer Vladmir Jabotinsky

July 27, 2014
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There’s room to wonder if Vladmir Jabotinsky would have accepted Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu as his legitimate Zionist heirs.

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