Books
It’s hard to grasp how Jonathan Lethem assimilated all this material — historical and fantastic — and gave it new narrative life in Dissident Gardens, except by granting, to start with, his special genius for absorption.
Read MoreIf Patrizia Cavalli’s poetry is egocentric, even probably autobiographical, its narrator shows a detachment enabling her to observe herself from one remove, even when she describes herself in the élans of attraction.
Read MoreGeorge Scialabba is still outfoxing the professional eggheads in For the Republic, his third collection of essays on political and cultural topics.
Read MoreHilary Holladay’s biography of Herbert Huncke provides valuable insight into a person and world that were begging to be explored.
Read MoreThere is a paucity of richness in The Goddess Chronicle. The myth might have been, but wasn’t, mined for tales of compassion, or inevitability of sorrow, or the psychology of misogyny or of revenge, or the strictures of fate.
Read MoreScissors is a roman à clef. But Stéphane Michaka has not composed a fictionalized biography mapping out the itinerary of Raymond Carver’s life. The novelist above all focuses on the creative process in which a writer named “Raymond” is involved.
Read MoreYoko Ono has always been the kind of artist more interested in getting into your head than convincing you to occupy hers.
Read MorePerhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.
Read MoreI am a secular Jew who can’t but welcome Zealot‘s conclusion that Christianity pulled a role reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power.
Read MoreIntellectual frameworks such as “the rise of Europe,” “the decline of the East,” or “the clash of civilizations,” tell us more about the laziness of the human mind than they do about history.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else