Books
This meticulous biography of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov is the labor of many years and of deep reflection and care.
This Judicial Review deals with the Boston premiere of John Harbison’s opera version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Read the reactions and join the conversation.
Deadpan sarcasm perfectly pitched, absurdity of target (and publisher) punctured with a minimum of muss and fuss.
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.

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