Books
The nine tales found in “Maybe This Time” chart the unnerving psychological transformations of its characters. Its style forces us to reconsider our ways of reading and our childlike dependency on narrative authority.
Entertaining and provocative, this quick-witted and dreamlike evening of theater suggests that imbalances of power sacrifice individual freedoms and love. Everyone becomes a doll (master and servant) in a doll society.
In this novel, author Ismet Prcic’s confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in the story.
“The Submission” has been compared to Richard Price’s richly evocative novels of New York life. It’s an apt comparison, though Amy Waldman brings a new cast of characters to bear, members of the Bangladeshi community.
What makes one opinion better than another? (Some opinions have been challenged more than others. Tested opinions are worth more than untested ones.) Can’t one enjoy an aesthetic experience without having to put it into words? (Absolutely, but those of us who write art criticism don’t have the luxury.)
“For an imaginative boy, the first experience of writing is like a tiger’s first taste of blood.’ — H.G. Wells, “The New Machiavelli,” 1911.
In “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.
In locales as varied as Israel, Kenya, Massachusetts, and the country of the brain, and in rough groupings of poems about small daily epiphanies, relationships, loss and death, and the sad affairs of the world, the poems in “The Illustrated Edge” explore the meandering paths of all sorts and mixtures of feelings.
Must age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
A symptom of our times: two books by self-described critics that aren’t particularly critical. Informed, lucid, thoughtful, and explanatory, yes –- strongly evaluative, no
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