Books

Book Review: “The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing’ — Pursuing Creative Inwardness

October 16, 2024
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The ascendancy of digital life is acknowledged as unshakable, but in these essays Sven Birkerts offers useful insights into how serious writers can carry on.

Book Review: “Hard to Watch” — How to Love Demanding Films

October 15, 2024
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“Hard to Watch” lays out a pragmatic path — directions for how to preserve your time and attention —  that will help just about anybody engage with any kind of art thoughtfully and purposefully.

Book Review: “Blue Light Hours” — Unimpeachable Noticing

October 15, 2024
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Bruna Dantas Lobato’s sensibility is unmistakably original: she explores her protagonist’s life and surroundings like a dowsing rod, poking into closets, corners, and cupboards.

Book Review: “The Second Shot” — An Incomplete Story

October 10, 2024
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This memoir is, in part, Gene Yu’s effort to give credit where credit is due for his rescue of a woman kidnapped by the Jihadist terrorist group Abu Sayyaf.

Book Review: “Not Even Nominated” — They Shoulda Been Oscar Contenders

October 10, 2024
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Critic John DiLeo argues that even the Academy Awards can make mistakes. And, in the process, he constructs an alternate history of who should or should not have been Oscar nominees.

Book Review: “The Propagandist” — The Power of Flawed Memory

October 8, 2024
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Cecile Desprairies’ extraordinary work is a cross between the dispassionate inquiry of a historian and a family memoir whose author is searching for catharsis at the end of her attempt to understand her family’s place in the Nazi-collaborationist narrative. 

Book Review: “The Year That Made the Musical” Gets the Year Wrong

October 7, 2024
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William A. Everett’s book is well-researched but based on a problematic premise.

Poetry Review: “Falsework” — Poems That Leave Room for the Reader’s Echo

October 6, 2024
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Time and again, Alice Fogel’s poems’ subtractions have a purifying effect, showing us a landscape or an architecture we hadn’t guessed was there.

Book Review: “Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv” — Revisiting Lost Optimism

October 5, 2024
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A magical realist romp of a novel with a dollop of poignancy by the great Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov.

Book Review: “We Have Never Been Woke” — Privileged Sleepers

October 4, 2024
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Musa Al-Gharbi’s provocative book undercuts the left elite by pointing out the hypocrisy of its well intentioned rhetoric. The “woke” live comfortable lives because of the very inequities they condemn.

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