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By Bill Marx A major Italian novelist with a worldwide reputation, Alberto Moravia, would have been 100 this year, but even in his homeland the parties are halfhearted. We should be breaking out the champagne and discovering this still subversive realist. The excellent Literary Saloon recently sent me to an article in Il velino that…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Fiction in translation deserves all the notice it can get, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to patronize writers and readers by duplicating the happy talk that is turning people off of blurb-ridden book reviews in the mainstream media. My friend Chad Post, formerly at Dalkey Archive Press, has begun a…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx In his critically acclaimed novels and stories, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami sings of the subterranean connections between software and the supernatural. After Dark (Knopf, 191 pp, $22.95) Haruki Murakami is a hip cultural diagnostician who would like to be viewed as a melancholic poet of the postmodern condition, a writer who has…
Read MoreThe Pogues are back and they’re ready to rock. By Ira Kantor BOSTON, Mass.– For the iconoclastic (and newly reunited) band The Pogues, the moment of truth has arrived. It’s 8:30 p.m. and Boston’s aged Orpheum Theatre has just gone dark. Cheers and applause rattle the walls. Is the worst going to happen or will…
Read MoreBoston-area college art museums go where many mainstream exhibition spaces fear to tread. By Margaret Weigel Originally Published February 07, 2006 Boston, MA – Throw a stone in Boston and you’ll hit a college (or an undergraduate); throw it a little further, and you’ll likely hit a college gallery or museum. The Boston metropolitan area…
Read MoreGiven the growing inclination, in the name of security, to regulate public expression, is it any wonder that protest art is scarce?
Read MoreIncreasingly, artistic directors are expected to be super-successful fundraisers, an unstable hybrid of peddler and visionary that throttles artistic independence. By Bill Marx The failure to renew the contract of Robert Woodruff as artistic director of one of America’s major regional theaters, the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, is symptomatic of a new…
Read MoreThis is an intelligent exhibit, not just conceptually but in that it requires the viewer to actively make connections while absorbing the art.
Read MoreThose looking to expand their horizons on art and narrative should make the time for Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy, a very (nearly three hours) long but equally rewarding debut from director Michael Maglaras, who also stars in the film. By Adrienne LaFrance Cleophas and His Own is the recitation of a…
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Critical Homage: A. Alvarez — Beyond Fiddling Away
By Bill Marx Al Alvarez’s new book of essays provides an opportunity to also strongly recommend his first collection of literary commentary and reviews, 1969’s Beyond All This Fiddle, one of the most invigorating collections of cultural commentary from that period. The latest issue of the TLS features an irritatingly short review of Risky Business,…
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