Books
ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE is an intermittently engaging and very useful book for millions of partners, parents, children, friends and caretakers of stroke victims as well as anyone else interested in the workings of the mind.
Read MoreAt the very least, showing the triumph of reality over inane illusions of perfection doesn’t lead to particularly complex drama; it is sort of like picking off myopic dreamers in a barrel.
Read MoreFrench writer Jacques Jouet is a critic, playwright, novelist, and short story writer. His novella “Upstaged” is an ingenious comedy about theatrical transformation that runs with the notion that when art is live anything might go, that perhaps Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author didn’t go far enough and come up with a better play amongst themselves.
Read MoreThis is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.
Read MoreMost great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.
Read MoreIf the verse in UNSEEN HAND refuses triumphant fictions, there is an attentive, persevering dignity in its preference for seriality. Because these recurring poems recreate our being in the world, they are powerful tools for returning to it.
Read MoreBuckets of blood and handfuls of guts always look slightly ridiculous splashed and dangled around on stage, though I must admit that this is the first RICHARD III I have seen with a working chainsaw.
Read MoreAuthor Carol Verburg covers a sinfully neglected part of Edward Gorey’s career –- the books on his art deal cursorily, if at all, with his forays into theater as a director, designer, actor, and writer
Read MoreAmbitious, by turns captivating and exasperating, this sprawling book is like an enormous photomontage—that popular German art form of the 1920s—made up of textual mosaics from newspaper articles, diary entries, letters, novels, or, on occasion, FBI files.
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Arts Commentary: Can Criticism Be Too Positive Too Often?
How much do you really know about a critic if all you have on record is what he or she likes and why? At some point staying mum about the negative looks less like tenderhearted support or good manners and more like cowardice or a lack of seriousness. By Bill Marx The news that veteran,…
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