Books
Book product, much like food product, is manufactured –- from its very inception, designed to make money by shameless pandering to mainstream taste.
You are hardly aware of the historical facts. Kate Grenville internalizes them so completely in her novel there is not a sentence that “stinks of history,” as a friend of mine once said about whole historical fiction genre.
There have been over twenty movie adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft stories, all nearly forgotten. And yet Lovecraft’s sensibility serves as a guide to much of today’s cinema.
In his novel, Sayed Kashua paints such a vivid picture of modern Jerusalem that I found myself longing to see that city again; he also portrays a whole spectrum of Arab life in Israel — from the poor families visited by the social workers to the ambitious Arab mothers and their sometimes feckless sons — with empathy and humor.
One feels when reading this anthology of Latin American poetry that editor Ilan Stavans tucks each poet he features into a folder, but that this categorization, while limiting, also encourages an English-speaking readership to appreciate the eye-opening diversity of Latin American poetry.
In The Life of an Unknown Man Andreï Makine creates a work of simple elegance that at its core explores the relationship of the past to the present, of truth to art, and of truth to life.
Given the flood of publications on early modern natural history over the last two decades, the detailed and strikingly illustrated Picturing the Book of Nature represents a herculean undertaking.
Into the Garden with Charles reads like a great love letter: beautifully written, full of feeling, a document of an intimate connection that never lost its wonder for the author.
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