Books
Jeffrey Sweet has provided a handy oral history of the ways playwriting has changed over three generations.
The imperative to engage with landscape, and thus leave or at least minimize the self, has become of great importance to Peter Handke.
A beautiful, if somewhat meandering, series of vignettes on the writer’s lifelong relationship with cigarettes.
Mark Lilla argues that the creed of the reactionary mind can be just as radical (and disturbing) as any revolutionary ideology.
This is the work of an extremely talented writer whose prose is spare and exact and has an authenticity that marks him as the real thing.
“Art . . . is . . . fundamental equipment for existence on human terms.” — Albert Murray
Tony Fletcher’s research is impeccable, his sources are unimpeachable, and his style is thoroughly engaging.
We learn a great deal about Hayim Nahman Bialik’s life in this biography. But the volume does not live up to its subtitle.
A Painter of Our Time is a gorgeous rumination on art, love, sexuality, revolution, capitalism, exile, propaganda, politics, human nature, and society.
Book Review and Commentary: Albert Murray’s Non-fiction – A Balm in Columbia
At his best, Albert Murray is a thinker passionately in love with thinking, a virtuoso of verbal music, an American to his core.
Read More about Book Review and Commentary: Albert Murray’s Non-fiction – A Balm in Columbia