Books
Despite “Middle C”’s relative cheeriness, the novel passes a tough sentence on the human race, so uncompromising that its protagonist has a hard time writing it down.
There is a steadiness about Nicholas Roe’s writing that is deceptive; the life in the Life does not jump off the page, but it accumulates during the reading so that something of what it felt like to be around John Keats remains, as things do when truly experienced.
“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is spectacular.
While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
What is Harvard Square today but a shopping spree waiting to happen, a student lounge, a food court? What could a novel gain by being set in that venue?
Simultaneously storyteller and player, ancient character and modern respondent, Denis O’Hare’s performance of “An Iliad” elicits the kind of respect automatically granted this genre of demanding monologual performance.
Susanne M. Sklar’s study is the best exploration of William Blake’s miraculously bewildering masterpiece that I know of — thoughtful, scholarly, imaginative, and supremely sympathetic to the poet’s ornery complexity as well as his capacity to inspire wonder.
The best parts of this book of interviews come when Charles Mingus or his collaborators talk about the music.
Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.
If I suffered half as much from the thought that most art has been lost as I suffer every day from the recollection of departed family and friends, I would be in a mental hospital. In this sense, I found myself resisting the message of “The Melancholy Art,” to the point that I felt that the book was laying a guilt trip on me.
Recent Comments