Books
By Bill Marx In his conversation with me for the World Books podcast, Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry insists that, unlike imaginative writers in Eastern Europe, who seem to have dried up after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Irish authors are making good use of their recent freedom to talk about the corruption…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume “Dreaming up America” By Russell Banks Seven Stories Press, 176 pages, $21.95 This book of essays by novelist and short story writer Russell Banks was published before our country’s financial crisis reached the acute stage from which it may or may not be recovering, or the author would surely have voiced bracing…
Read MorePorochista Khakpour at the Brooklyn Book Fair. The late David Foster Wallace was her hero. By Bill Marx The latest World Books podcast features my conversation at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Iranian-American author Porochista Khakpour, whose first novel, “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” earned accolades from “The New Yorker” as well as the “New…
Read Moreby Bill Marx “If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.” Rushdie’s piggybacked history of the hemisphere’s premier intellectual ironists is correct but, at least until the last decade or so, Machado…
Read MoreBreyten Breytenbach at this year’s Brooklyn Book Fair By Bill Marx On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to South African writer, painter, and human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach about his recently published book of mordantly fantastic fables “All One Horse.” In America, Breytenbach is known, if at all, for his four highly unconventional…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx A scene from the world premiere production of Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian’s “Of Mountains and Seas.” “Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts” By Gao Xingjian. Translated from the Chinese by Gilbert C.F. Fong The Chinese University Press, distributed by Columbia University Press Filled with wise-cracking mythological…
Read MoreAnother neglected master from New Zealand — writer C.K. Stead by Bill Marx I just noticed that a week before Janet Frame’s previously unpublished story “Gorse is not People” appeared in “The New Yorker” the magazine published a poem by another fine New Zealand author, C.K. Stead. He not only knew Frame at the time…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Posthumous publication of a book by a great but grievously neglected writer gives posterity a chance to either rectify its mistake or compound it. The recent appearance in the “New Yorker” of a previously unpublished Janet Frame short story, which was deemed to be “too painful” for print in 1954, has generated…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Though it does not originate in the Kuiper Belt, the Beijing summer Olympics (8/8/08-8/24/08) is bearing down upon us like an outsized asteroid, bringing China out of feudal/communist distance into full twenty-first century relief. Sports, at this point, remain secondary:before we get to ping-pong, swimming, the shot-put and gymnastics, Americans have unprecedented…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Hu Jia, a freelance writer, civil rights, environmental and AIDS activist, was arrested in 2007 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” Last week the PEN American Center announced it was sending out letters to the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders protesting, fifty days before the start of the Olympics, the…
Read More
Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam — Tom Stoppard