Books
I wish this catalogue spelled out John Singer Sargent’s professional stance as a “juste milieu” painter more methodically. That term refers to those eager to be associated with new stylistic tendencies yet careful not to transgress the establishment’s norms.
The author argues that “the only way to prevent the senseless acts of cruelty” that result from the “grinding gears” of the “machinery of death” is to “retire the machinery altogether.”
For fans of director Stanley Kubrick, this enhanced biography may be the most thorough and readable volume on one of the cinema’s most profound seers.
Though lapsing at times into hagiography and muddled synopsizing, James Miller’s study of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is a bracing reminder of the greatness and ever-evolving genius of this world-class artist.
The fact that readers have dismissed Jim as a fool or have misunderstood Mark Twain’s intent in Huckleberry Finn reflects on our limitations.
With visionary daring, Elllen Wilbur leads us into unexpected corners, then transcends them profoundly and beyond expectation. Such stories are more than “moral fictions.” They are soul-shakers.
Despite its title, this YA novel would be best described as an exercise in magic realist satire. Those looking for heaping helpings of the affluent will be disappointed.
In three books of oblique self-reflection Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explores and exposes the artistic and intellectual thresholds that have been central to his life and to the life of his mind.
Initially, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s resonant novel seems to be the study of the moods and challenges of a man waiting for the only person who gives his life meaning.
The value of “On Frost and Eliot” is sending the reader spinning out of its own text and back to poems by two of the major poets of the 20th century, each of whom has suffered from the vagaries of fashion, both in popularity and neglect.
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