Books
At the very least, Jerome Charyn’s considerable novelistic imagination should send readers back to any number of documentary films and, most important, to the still very real fact of Maria Callas’s vital recorded legacy.
Read MoreLarry Charles is by every standard a seminal figure in contemporary humor, on the tube and in movie theaters. Why doesn’t everyone know his name
Read MoreThere is a moral to this story, besides the obvious one, that murder is a horrible crime whether the body is found or not. If there are wealthy women with weaknesses to exploit, predators will find them.
Read MoreWe have a biography that reads like a novel in its range and intensity, a biography that forces us to dig deeper into our own preconceived prejudices and understand another man — a famous writer — in ways that neither he nor we might have ever thought possible.
Read MoreMick Herron’s prose, it must be said, remains top-notch, chock full of puns and timely references, as well as colorful dialogue. But the premise of this successful series of espionage thrillers is beginning to show some wear.
Read MoreThis novel is as fresh and charming as any contemporary work this critic has read in ages.
Read MoreBy Trevor Fairbrother The Queer Lens project made me think about queer culture and camera culture as distinct phenomena that began in the Victorian era: each was a manifestation of modernity. The latest exhibition that Paul Martineau has curated at the J. Paul Getty Museum is titled Queer Lens: A History of Photography and features…
Read MoreTwo books that deal with different rituals of autumn.
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Book Commentary: Three Weeks Before the Mast — Reading “Moby Dick”
A slow thinker, I read 600 pages into “Moby Dick” before putting my finger on the book’s key tension. It’s between Ishmael’s intense and ecological whale love and the central story which chronicles the wanton murdering of whales, man’s unconcern with destroying the natural world.
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