Books
“As an artist, you probably know when a project pulls at you, sometimes kicking and screaming. Shylock definitely has me by the back of the neck.”
Read MoreHelen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Read MoreIn the heartrending “Three Strong Women,” award-winning novelist Marie NDiaye infuses her Senegalese women characters with a personal sense of dignity and a strong belief in self.
Read MoreSponsored by the Harvard Writing Program and the Harvard Summer School, the event was introduced, perhaps humorously, to the audience as a “meeting of German–American relations.” In reality, it was a more of a showcase in differences about each country’s historical imagination.
Read More“The Dream of the Celt” succeeds at educating its readers about the worlds in which Sir Roger Casement lived his successive lives, but not about his successive personalities.
Read MoreShakespeare’s “Coriolanus” deals with the difficultly of recognizing superiority at a time of radical social breakdown, specifically when it is democracy that is in extremis.
Read MoreFor anyone interested in classical music, “Motherless Child” is a novel to be savored. And there is no doubt that Zeitlin has gotten those details right. She is the widow of the great violinist and teacher, Zvi Zeitlin, who died this past May at 90.
Read MoreAs monster fiction, “Vlad” has hints, now and then, of what “Talulla Rising” doesn’t aspire to. In the former, Carlos Fuentes peels back the familiar to provide glimpses of the genuinely horrific.
Read MoreIrving Berlin fans will be pleased to see such items as the complete Jerome Kern letter, (written in 1925!) in which Kern writes: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. HE IS AMERICAN MUSIC.”
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