Books

Book Review: “Hanoi’s War” — A Must-Read About the War in Vietnam

November 19, 2012
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“Hanoi’s War” deserves far more attention than it has thus far received. It enriches our understanding of the War in Vietnam and by implication, subsequent American commitments, including the war in Afghanistan.

Book Review: The Boston Jazz Chronicles — Indispensible History

November 19, 2012
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Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles will be a foundational document that other researchers will turn to again and again as they delve into more specific niches of Boston jazz history and unearth as yet unknown artifacts of this era and its neglected body of music.

Arts Remembrance: A Grateful Farewell to this Generation’s Best Champion of the Short Story

November 18, 2012
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Isaiah Sheffer’s lasting contribution will be his almost single-handed revival of interest in that most beguiling of fictional forms, the short story.

Poetry Review: Yvan Goll’s “Dreamweed” — Visions of a Shape-shifter

November 16, 2012
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Yvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.

Book Interview: Serbian Writer David Albahari — Letting Loose the Leeches

November 14, 2012
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By Bill Marx Arts Fuse: Tell me how Leeches came about, given how different it is from your other books, at least those in translation. David Albahari: It is different from other books of mine. But then, there were several things that made me, in the end, write the book. First of all, I wanted…

Theater Review: “Tales From Ovid” — An Embarrassment of Riches

November 9, 2012
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Director Meg Taintor’s demands on her five young actors – three women and two men — are very high, requiring not only daring, but physical stamina and skill, dance training, mime training, fight training, and musicianship as well as dramatic power.

Poetry Review: “Dialogos” — Superb Poetic Conversations

November 9, 2012
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Translator George Kalogeris’s modernizing does what it should: It brings the poems into the thought-world where modern readers live.

Book Review: A Flimsily Built “House of the Interpreter”

October 31, 2012
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Instead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.

Book Review: A Wilted “Black Flower” From Korea

October 28, 2012
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I can see why celebrated Korean writer Young-ha Kim was attracted to this real life story of about a thousand Koreans emigrating from Asia in 1904.

Appreciation: Slamming the Tradition — massmouth Mounts Its First Folk and Fairy Tale Slam

October 21, 2012
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The late John Updike, Harvard Professor Maria Tartar recalled, described fairy tales as “the television and pornography of an earlier era.”

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