Books
For those who missed this evening, pick up Roz Chast’s “Theories of Everything,” which is a wonderfully huge collection of her cartoons published in “The New Yorker.”
In an age where technology has made the improbable perfectly plausible, squeezed out spontaneity, and raised skepticism about the nature of reality, how can we still believe in miracles? This is the crux of the novel, made delightfully vivid and comic by César Aira’s prose.
In 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
David Ferry’s voice is quiet but never shirks. It admits directly and indirectly that the world is a perplexing place.
Editor Bharat Tandon guides us expertly through “Emma,” stopping along the way to augment the text by clarifying usages, concepts, and references that may stump the 21st-century reader.
An adaptor has to make choices, and this theatrical version of “Invisible Man” focuses on the novel’s most straightforward narrative strand.
In this production, director Piotr Fomenko “wanted to explore whether family happiness is even possible, the fight to keep it and the fear of losing it.”
Uzma Aslam Khan is a wonderful writer whose descriptions of the northern part of Pakistan and the fast fading way of life that had been lived there for hundreds of years are sometimes stunning.
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” was simply too good a movie, perfect, in its way, and the director of “Killing Them Softly” wants to avoid comparison.
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters