Books
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.
Part of what made “The Dream Merchant” so compelling, and at times, harrowing, a read for me are its themes: love, loss, rags and riches, to be sure, but also the theme of aging, and associated loss of power and possibility.
James Longenbach’s ear for the nuances of diction, tone, stress, and the material aspects of poetry is so good, and his grasp of context and biography so assured, one wonders why the essays so often tie themselves into semantic and logical knots.
In her groundbreaking study, Tufts University professor Alisha Rankin essentially revises the history of medicine by showing that women, presumed to be marginal in the development early modern medicine, were actually major players.
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