Books

Theater Review: “Tales From Ovid” — An Embarrassment of Riches

November 9, 2012
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Director Meg Taintor’s demands on her five young actors – three women and two men — are very high, requiring not only daring, but physical stamina and skill, dance training, mime training, fight training, and musicianship as well as dramatic power.

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Poetry Review: “Dialogos” — Superb Poetic Conversations

November 9, 2012
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Translator George Kalogeris’s modernizing does what it should: It brings the poems into the thought-world where modern readers live.

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Book Review: A Flimsily Built “House of the Interpreter”

October 31, 2012
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Instead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.

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Book Review: A Wilted “Black Flower” From Korea

October 28, 2012
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I can see why celebrated Korean writer Young-ha Kim was attracted to this real life story of about a thousand Koreans emigrating from Asia in 1904.

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Appreciation: Slamming the Tradition — massmouth Mounts Its First Folk and Fairy Tale Slam

October 21, 2012
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The late John Updike, Harvard Professor Maria Tartar recalled, described fairy tales as “the television and pornography of an earlier era.”

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Book Review: Denis Johnson’s Plays in Verse — The Art of Talking with the Devil

October 18, 2012
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One answer to the question of “Why two plays in verse?” might be that Denis Johnson is a writer relentlessly in pursuit of new forms, and new formal challenges—a literary daredevil always looking for a new vehicle to take for a thrill ride.

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Book Review: An Admirable Look at the Art of Robert Frost

October 12, 2012
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THE ART OF ROBERT FROST helped me get closer to the poems and in doing so helped me get closer to the poet.

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Book Review: The Overthrow of Pessimism — Sherman Alexie’s Song of Redemption

October 3, 2012
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Grappling with one’s identity — complicated by the relationships between tradition and modernism, cultural history and the process of assimilation — is central to most of Sherman Alexie’s stories, and his exploration of these complexities is compelling and illuminating.

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Book Review: Per Petterson’s “It’s Fine By Me” — A Sensitive Tale of a Lost Boy

October 1, 2012
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“It’s Fine By Me” is the story of so many lost boys in literature, who run, who rebel, who are crushed, or luckily find their way.

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Book Review: Steve Stern’s Fabulous “Book of Mischief”

September 27, 2012
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Here is a writer whose vision and generous spirit cannot be ignored. And that Steve Stern writes a prose as fine as anyone could wish must be emphasized, as well.

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