World Books
Both of these novels about social corruption should be in every Occupy Wall Street library in the country: inequality is not a matter of fate but the result of an exhausted acquiescence to subterfuge.
Read MoreThe nine tales found in “Maybe This Time” chart the unnerving psychological transformations of its characters. Its style forces us to reconsider our ways of reading and our childlike dependency on narrative authority.
Read MoreIn this novel, author Ismet Prcic’s confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in the story.
Read More“For an imaginative boy, the first experience of writing is like a tiger’s first taste of blood.’ — H.G. Wells, “The New Machiavelli,” 1911.
Read MoreMust age diminish a great poet’s strengths? If I grant that age has such power, I’m left to ponder the truly strange fact that death does not.
Read MoreThe brilliance of Alberto Moravia’s cool diagnostic vision — sleek, clear, cruel, and existential no matter how emotional the conflict — puts us off. His male protagonists often self-consciously analyze their puerility to the point of comic masochism.
Read MoreA best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.
Read MoreShould we fictionalize the Holocaust? This is not only a literary question, but a moral one as well, issues raised by the publication of the translation of “The Emperor of Lies,” a novel about the ways in which the Jews in the Lodz ghetto struggled to survive the Nazis.
Read MoreFor French writer Pierre-Albert Jourdan, paradox and its close kin aphorism were ways to approach the ineffable, the infinite, the immanent, and above all the state of unity between self and world that he devotedly, passionately sought.
Read MoreAnyone who has sat through a commercial for one pill or another will recognize and acknowledge the satiric thrust of this enjoyable 1920’s French farce.
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else