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“There were times when I felt as if I were perpetually stuck, like in that film, ‘Groundhog Day,’ in the spring of 1992 just as Bosnia was careening into conflict. At one point I went to Sarajevo to visit friends and was relieved, indeed surprised, to find that while I had been re-living the war over and over, the city was gradually rebuilding and leaving the war behind.”
“On China” boasts photos of Henry Kissinger’s numerous visits to China. In many you see him smiling hugely, brandishing chopsticks alongside the likes of Zhou Enlai. He’s enjoying making history — and the food.
ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE is an intermittently engaging and very useful book for millions of partners, parents, children, friends and caretakers of stroke victims as well as anyone else interested in the workings of the mind.
At the very least, showing the triumph of reality over inane illusions of perfection doesn’t lead to particularly complex drama; it is sort of like picking off myopic dreamers in a barrel.
French writer Jacques Jouet is a critic, playwright, novelist, and short story writer. His novella “Upstaged” is an ingenious comedy about theatrical transformation that runs with the notion that when art is live anything might go, that perhaps Pirandello’s six characters in search of an author didn’t go far enough and come up with a better play amongst themselves.
This is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.
How much do you really know about a critic if all you have on record is what he or she likes and why? At some point staying mum about the negative looks less like tenderhearted support or good manners and more like cowardice or a lack of seriousness. By Bill Marx The news that veteran,…
Most great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.
If the verse in UNSEEN HAND refuses triumphant fictions, there is an attentive, persevering dignity in its preference for seriality. Because these recurring poems recreate our being in the world, they are powerful tools for returning to it.
Book Commentary: A Thousand Words for Paul West
Paul West’s goal is to expand consciousness through the uninhibited play of the imagination, to revel in the glory of words, not to preach lessons in civic do-gooding. And that anarchistic intensity has gotten him into trouble with those who mistakenly believe that exploring the mind of evil indicates approval.
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