World Books
“The Whore From Ohio” is a provocative reminder that the same creature that is born to eat, drink, copulate, rot, and die is also a creature that dreams, tells stories, contemplates its own existence, and attends the theater.
Read MoreIn “Some Day,” Shemi Zarhin has masterfully woven together a tangle of bittersweet tales and elusive dreams. it is a book that is a pleasure to read and reread.
Read MoreRefreshingly, playwright Marianna Salzmann manages to be political without being didactic. Her characters live (rather than preach) through history, grappling with the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
Read MoreInterestingly, both of these powerful visions of horror root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children.
Read MoreCocaine’s bleak and brilliant satire, lush and intoxicating prose, and sadistic playfulness remain as fresh and caustic as they were nine decades ago.
Read MoreIf Patrizia Cavalli’s poetry is egocentric, even probably autobiographical, its narrator shows a detachment enabling her to observe herself from one remove, even when she describes herself in the élans of attraction.
Read MoreThere is a paucity of richness in The Goddess Chronicle. The myth might have been, but wasn’t, mined for tales of compassion, or inevitability of sorrow, or the psychology of misogyny or of revenge, or the strictures of fate.
Read MoreScissors is a roman à clef. But Stéphane Michaka has not composed a fictionalized biography mapping out the itinerary of Raymond Carver’s life. The novelist above all focuses on the creative process in which a writer named “Raymond” is involved.
Read MorePerhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.
Read More
Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam — Tom Stoppard