Books

Book Review: The Story of the ‘Hand Grenade’ — Emmanuel Carrère’s Biography of the Russian Writer Eduard Limonov

November 5, 2014
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A compelling chronicle of the life of the notorious Russian writer and political activist Eduard Limonov.

Book Interview: No Guns — No Civil Rights?

November 5, 2014
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“If you’re dead you won’t have a movement, and guns kept people alive. In particular, kept people who made the movement alive.”

Book Review: “Stealing All Transmissions” — How The Clash Conquered America

November 3, 2014
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Stealing All Transmissions is slim, but nearly every page is filled with insight and originality.

Arts Remembrance: Galway Kinnell — “The Cadence of Vanishing”

November 1, 2014
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Galway Kinnell served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont and penned a number of poems, which often took the form of pastoral ramblings, that celebrated his appreciation of the rural life.

Book Review: “The Zone of Interest” — Not Quite Interesting Enough

October 30, 2014
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Martin Amis’s fiction, bleak though it often is, paradoxically remains compelling and pleasurable to read because of how well he writes about dreadful things.

Poetry Review: “The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett” — Castings

October 28, 2014
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Have we been missing a major poet while we celebrated a great dramatist and the most influential fiction writer of the second half of the twentieth century?

Fuse Book Review: The Novels of Mathias Énard — Probing the Intersection of Politics and Conscience

October 24, 2014
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Although Street of Thieves is less accomplished than Zone, it once again displays how Mathias Énard is seeking new ways to talk political issues in precise, often gripping prose.

Book Commentary: Patrick Modiano — An Oddly Elliptical Choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature

October 23, 2014
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Patrick Modiano’s simple sentences pull one in; the nostalgia of loss and pain of youth and the hunt for a vague, romantic Other are easy to relate to.

Book Review: Lunacy Trumps Religion When It Comes To Peace in the Middle East

October 20, 2014
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Religion occupies pride of place in this volume. As Lawrence Wright says at the outset: “The struggle for peace at Camp David is a testament to the enduring force of religion in modern life”

Book Interview: The Boston Book Festival — Six Years On and Thriving

October 18, 2014
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“The Boston Book Festival is doing really well. It feels like an established part of Boston’s cultural scene.”

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