Books
Poet Mel Kenne, like a desert ascetic, has pared away everything that is not essential -— no words have been wasted in the making of this collection.
Norman Manea’s compelling novel “The Lair” tracks the ambiguities, contradictions, and confusions of the exile’s psyche as he struggles to find footing in surroundings that are often unintelligible. It is a highly cerebral, labyrinthine book, filled with mystery, paranoia, and illegible codes.
Here you have it: Werewolves are horny, vamps merely thirsty. This, to be sure, is material to work with, as novelist Glen Duncan does. But I can’t help thinking about great nineteenth-century novels of involuntary transformation.
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.
Cultural Commentary — Northrop Frye at 100
Northrop Frye, inspired by the poet William Blake, demands that the critic be a warrior in a “mental fight,” articulating the liberating value of literature as a source of imaginative energy that generates possibilities.
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