Books

Poetry Review: “Gabriel, A Poem” — A Terrible Beauty

October 17, 2014
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Gabriel is a searing experience to read, filled with sadness but also humor and forbearance, and may give comfort to parents who are dealing with difficult children.

Book Review: Associate Justice Antonin Scalia — A Judge Who Refuses to Evolve

October 15, 2014
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Bruce Allen Murphy conveys the impression that Scalia knows how he feels on every issue before the briefs have been argued.

Book Review: “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” — A Definitive Biography of One of Our Most Important Playwrights

October 14, 2014
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The biography is a remarkable read. It has all the hefty research you’d expect from a scholarly work, yet the story is told through prose fit for a great novel.

Book Review: In Quest of the Elemental — André du Bouchet’s “Openwork”

October 13, 2014
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André du Bouchet writes the kind of poetry that other poets ponder, perhaps resist or even reject for a while, yet inevitably return to study even if (or because) their own poetics are starkly dissimilar to his.

Book Review: Merritt Tierce’s Smart and Ruthless “Love Me Back” — The Way We Live Now

October 13, 2014
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So much of what this novel has to say feels bracing and necessary. This is where a good part of America lives—dangling over a chasm.

Book Review: “The Great Gatsby” — The Greatest American Novel?

October 11, 2014
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There’s no debate: The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel, with Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn as also-rans.

Fuse Book Review: “The Bone Clocks” — Not Sufficiently Wound Up

October 10, 2014
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While The Bone Clocks is compulsively readable, there are too many parts of this book that can only be called lazy.

Book Review: “The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life” – Frankétienne’s “spiralist” novel “Ready to Burst”

October 6, 2014
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Ready to Burst is a compelling, intricately structured story told in resourceful, oft-poetic language by a influential Haitian poet and novelist.

Book Review: The Humanist Cinema of Taiwanese Director Hou Hsiao-hsien — Nothing But the Essential

October 5, 2014
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An exciting complement to the new book is a traveling retrospective of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, a rare opportunity to see 19 of the director’s movies shown on 35mm film: at Cambridge’s Harvard Film Archive through November 2.

Book Review: Sanford Friedman’s Utterly Original “Conversations with Beethoven”

October 2, 2014
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How well Conversations with Beethoven works as fiction will depend on the engagement and imaginative powers of the reader.

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