Anyone who reads this bestselling, critically acclaimed novel becomes part of the focus group for the inevitable television or Hollywood stinker.
Books
Photograph to Book Cover
By Karl Baden View Gallery I’ve been spending far too much time in secondhand bookstores. I’ll waste hours in the shelves, looking, mostly without success, for those iconic photo books that I couldn’t afford when I was younger, and now are as rare as hen’s teeth. While prowling the stacks, I began to notice that […]
Lyrical Hyperdrive
In a new collection of his poetry, Albert Goldbarth supplies a marvelous mosaic of images, quantum leaps of intuition, and artifacts of historical anecdotes.
Book Review: Don’t Fear the Cyborg
An engaging new memoir explores how the fusion of man and machine is about maintaining humanity, not creating monsters.
Rock Review: The Music Never Stopped
With the arrival of a new biography and DVD, guitarist Jimi Hendrix may have finally gotten his due, the pieces of his puzzle finally assembled, with just enough mystery left over for the ages. “Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix” by Charles R. Cross. (Hyperion); “Jimi Hendrix Live at Woodstock [The Deluxe […]
Sympathy for a Terrorist?
Salman Rushdie’s latest novel wants readers to fall in love with — or at least feel sympathy for — an Islamic militant.
Warning: Outsider Art
An increasingly popular movement in the visual arts prides itself on picturing everything that is the raw, untutored, and irrational.
Book Review: “The World Republic of Letters” — A Literary Demolition Derby
An intriguingly speculative study argues that the history of world literature boils down to a power struggle between outsiders and insiders.
Book Review: Orhan Pamuk’s Memories — Istanbul the Melancholic
By Vincent Czyz In his latest book, acclaimed writer Orhan Pamuk has penned an intriguing memoir that focuses on his relationship with Istanbul, the city in which he has always lived. Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Knopf. Ottoman poets were fond of referring to Istanbul, then known to the world as Constantinople, […]
Cosmic Cloak and Dagger
Spanish literary phenomenon Javier Marias has come up with a spy novel that is more concerned with a theoretical investigation of truth, trust, and betrayal than with cloak and dagger spying.