Books
Of the major 20th-century writers in English, Patrick White stands with the best, partly because he refused to repeat himself, and partly because he refuses to tell you everything, so that when you read him there is a sense of discovery.
Judging by the trailer for The Great Gatsby, it looks as if director Baz Luhrmann’s habitual excess will overwhelm the lyrical beauty and subtle power of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose.
The poetry of Palestinian author Ghassan Zaqtan dwells in the space between life and death, memory and erasure, respite and continuous travel.
As sorry as I was to lose Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes last week, I was nonetheless deeply pleased that he reached the age of 83. I almost killed him when he was 37.
Stefan Zweig’s was a dramatic, action-packed, intense epic of a life, but Oliver Matuschek’s biography, Three Lives, simply plods along.
Simon Garfield’s tour of fonts, Just My Type, is a rollicking, sometimes snarky social history of the design decisions behind lettering from Gutenberg to the iPad.
In spare, exact prose Cristian Comencini lets this story unfold against an Alpine setting that is so vivid it, too, becomes a character in this strangely compelling novel.
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