Books
Cocaine’s bleak and brilliant satire, lush and intoxicating prose, and sadistic playfulness remain as fresh and caustic as they were nine decades ago.
Between the heroin, booze, and all else that Mexico had to offer, there was little to no time for William S. Burroughs to appreciate the culture of his adopted home.
I found myself most interested by the fact that so many of the changes that took place at WBCN made absolute sense to me, even if I had an aesthetic beef with them.
There are hundreds of studies to be analyzed and many experts who could have been interviewed in depth, but both authors have chosen to write breezy books that can be characterized as “journalism-lite.”
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.
If 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.
George Scialabba is still outfoxing the professional eggheads in For the Republic, his third collection of essays on political and cultural topics.
Hilary Holladay’s biography of Herbert Huncke provides valuable insight into a person and world that were begging to be explored.
There 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.
Recent Comments