Books
Artists should “no longer huddle in the confines of a painted box set” but instead join together to “find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time” and dramatize “the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world.” – Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Project Stick…
American author Robert Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species. Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24 Reviewed by Harvey Blume Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone…
by Bill Marx On his way to the Cologne literature festival earlier this week, dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was escorted off the plane by the Chinese authorities and handed over to the police for interrogation. He has sent an open letter to the world, available in English, asking for help.
By Bill Marx Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks. Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant…
Joe Kurmaskie’s latest book, Mud, Sweat, and Gears, is funny, genuine, and inspiring. And it isn’t just a memoir about the Kurmaskie family’s epic bike trip across Canada one summer; it’s about the mud, sweat, and gears that keep a family together. Mud, Sweat, and Gears: A Rowdy Family Bike Adventure Across Canada on Seven…
I am one of the judges for the Best Translated Book Award (fiction division) sponsored by Three Percent. The five finalists will be announced in New York on February 16th. Three Percent honcho Chad Post needed help to meet his goal of posting a commentary on each of the 25 volumes on the BTB’s fiction…
By Kate Vander Wiede The Cantab, as the regulars called The Cantab Lounge, is like a quirky not-quite-speakeasy complete with a narrow stairwell leading below street level and smoke-perfumed attendees. This night, bass chords shake the ceiling, courtesy of the band headlining one floor up. Dim lights hardly illuminate the cramped room, which is lined…
Though the writing in Nothing Was the Same is often beautiful and moving, the memoir failed to fully engage me. Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison, Knopf, 208 pp., $25 by Helen Epstein In 1995, a psychology professor named Kay Redfield Jamison took the unusual step of publishing an article in her local…
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