Books
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
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In her search for John Lennon, the author follows her fancy and picks and chooses which rocks she wants to look under, all the while giving herself the space to wax poetic on whatever theme moves her. It’s an appealing approach. Too bad then that the book is a let down.
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This is a great work, more linear than Tom Stoppard’s earlier dramas, yet filled with such intelligence and compassion that it will be read and seen for years and years and, perhaps, over time be regarded as his richest, most haunting play.
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It is always a pleasure to read the poems of a writer who has an ear for language and an eye for form, a voice of their own, and an interest in a world beyond the reach of their own person.
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Endpapers is an invaluable gift to literature, mainly but not only for the quotations, details, and beguilingly written scenes of publisher Kurt Wolff’s life scattered throughout
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Of all the biographies of female musicians I’ve read in the past year, Last Chance Texaco is the most transparent about the vagaries of fame.
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Miss Pat, reggae’s Chinese-Jamaican matriarch, reflects on a life in riddim.
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Klara and the Sun is a dystopian novel worth recommending: it is a thought-provoking joy to read.
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For Alex Ross, Wagnerism is as profound and far-reaching an aesthetic ideology – for good, ill, and all degrees in between – as any.
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Book Commentary: Literary Legacies — Children’s Literature
2020 and 2021 saw the deaths of five titans of children’s and young adult literature. Here’s to revisiting old “classics” and discovering new ones.
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