Books
Director Robert Lepage’s “The Andersen Project” is a masterful meditation on the agonizing process of artistic creation. Few scripts bring the mixed essence of opportunism and magic of show biz together so effortlessly.
Claude Lanzmann is a great raconteur who’s honed his narrative skills as a veteran journalist. His memoir is exuberant and provocative at its best; bombastic and superficial at its worst.
After hearing just the first of William Kentridge’s six Norton Lectures, I have no doubt that this series of “Drawing Lessons” will be one of the most entertaining and enlightening artistic events of 2012.
This handsome edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and prose in English translation is a stunning presentation of a major poet.
An unusual and powerful historical drama that looks at the troubled relationship between Jews and freed slaves at the end of The Civil War.
While sound is certainly important, and language in the proper hands has its own music, syllabic harmonies need not be trumpeted as though they were the foundation of good prose.
In his exploration of history, Jack Beatty suggests that World War I, as we know it, was an improbable event.
Jonathan I. Israel has written a monumental three-volume history of the Enlightenment, approximately 2500 pages long, not including three lengthy bibliographies. His erudition is fabulous; his range is dizzying.
A strange mix of characters who all have complicated pasts gives rise to a novel that blossoms — exactly as a flower does — into a complex drama that includes several points of view and a wide range of emotions.
Both productions play around with chronology in order to show the dark side of history, to unmask convenient illusions of social or personal well-being by juxtaposing the myopia of the past with the payback of the future.
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