Books

Theater Interview: Viva August Strindberg — The Great Swedish Modernist

February 29, 2012
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August Strindberg’s work unquestionably has not received the degree of popular acclaim in America that it deserves. It’s a bit mysterious, given that major U.S. playwrights — Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams — have openly acknowledged their debts to Strindberg.

Fiction Review: “So There!” — Nicole Louise Reid’s Poetic Chick Lit

February 28, 2012
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“So There!” comes off as a poetic species of chick lit, its female characters desperate to break deadly dull routines, longing for more (not even sure what), but generally expecting the doorway to redemption —- a passage figuratively filled with light in their imaginations -— to be a man.

Book Review: Annotating Jane — An Illuminating New Edition of Austen’s Persuasion

February 28, 2012
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This invaluable addition to the Austen literature offers two for the price of one: a beautifully designed and printed edition of the novel many consider her best and a parallel critical commentary that deepens our understanding and opens up a rich, textured view of her world and time.

Book Review: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”

February 26, 2012
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The people of Annawadi live in conditions so bleak that “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” evoked, for one Indian reviewer, Primo Levi’s depiction of life in concentration camps.

Book Review: The Print-Pantheist — Cyprian Norwid’s “Poems”

February 21, 2012
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In light of the many translations of Cyprian Norwid’s verse into English, Danuta Borchardt thought carefully about what she was going to focus on.

Book Review: “Three Weeks in December”

February 15, 2012
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Some fiction can, literally, have the smell of too much research. And so, although I admire the ambition and scope of Audrey Schulman’s new novel, “Three Weeks in December,” I also feel that she made things harder for herself than she needed to.

Book Review: Unearthing the Lost Culture of Mathematics

February 9, 2012
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Elegantly written, cogently argued, and filled with trenchant artistic analyses, Alexander Marr’s book exemplifies interdisciplinary studies at their best.

Book Review: The Precarious Existence of Symphony Orchestras

February 4, 2012
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This is a book for anyone interested not just in the economic state of the symphony orchestra, but in the overall financial health of the arts in the United States.

Book Review: Niccolò Ammaniti’s “Me and You” — a lightly charming, digestible morsel

January 27, 2012
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Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti usually writes with an unadorned style about moral predicaments of the young in small-town Italy. “Me and You,” a slender effort in all respects, covers this ground as well, with the difference that fourteen-year-old protagonist Lorenzo Cumi is from an affluent Roman family.

Book Interview: S.T. Joshi on Ambrose Bierce — The Underappreciated Genius of Being Grim

January 24, 2012
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Bierce proffers a satiric temperament gone wild and woolly, partly propelled by a revulsion at the criminal vulgarity of the Gilded Age. Given the current triumph of the 1%, his fury at power mad corporations is worth an admiring look.

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