Books
Must age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
Read MoreA symptom of our times: two books by self-described critics that aren’t particularly critical. Informed, lucid, thoughtful, and explanatory, yes –- strongly evaluative, no
Read MoreJoshua Rubenstein’s succinct account of Leon Trotsky’s life rescues the Russian radical from a remoteness, positioning him at a useful distance for contemporary readers
Read MoreThe brilliance of Alberto Moravia’s cool diagnostic vision — sleek, clear, cruel, and existential no matter how emotional the conflict — puts us off. His male protagonists often self-consciously analyze their puerility to the point of comic masochism.
Read MoreA best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.
Read MoreWhat drives serious writing about film? “When Movies Mattered” suggests an answer: it helps for a critic to take a side, not as consumer advocate, hipster crank, or box office predictor, but as a passionate advocate for standards, often taking on the role of separating overpraised films from the unfairly neglected.
Read MoreShould we fictionalize the Holocaust? This is not only a literary question, but a moral one as well, issues raised by the publication of the translation of “The Emperor of Lies,” a novel about the ways in which the Jews in the Lodz ghetto struggled to survive the Nazis.
Read More9/11 has inspired a number of movies and TV documentaries, but theater works about the event are rare. What are dramatists and theater companies afraid of?
Read MoreI wouldn’t be writing this review or asking you to read this book if I didn’t believe that McLane were up to something far more radical and also far more difficult to reckon with—something I am not even sure I can account for. The most significant quality of the poetry in “World Enough” is a profound and unapologetic ambiguity.
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