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By Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
Read MoreThe governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh A Tomb Gets its Time Forget Indiana Jones. Archaeology is not about the obvious. Case in point: the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition, The Secrets of Tomb 10A, opening October 18.
Read MoreAuthor Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.” Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95. Reviewed by Mark Nolan…
Read MoreThe Massachusetts State Sandwich? Fluffernutter as Icon? By Sally Steinberg No serious eater, no gourmet, no culture vulture, no thinking person, no person of discriminating taste, no one interested in nutrition could…… But wait! The Fluffernutter might just be one of the secret food grails, its own Umami, all by itself, an elusive, indescribable, uncategorizable,…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of…
Read MoreBy Justin Marble October 1 through 3: Classic Cinema at Museum of Fine Arts: This weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts is showing two classic pieces of cinema. First up is Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” his reworking of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in feudal Japan. Then it’s Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” a 1969 Western that…
Read MoreFor a genre that supposedly expired in the 1950’s, the big band’s vital signs seem remarkably robust here in Boston. By J. R. Carroll A welcome recent addition has been the compositions and arrangements of tenor saxophonist Florencia Gonzalez, which layer vivid sonorities and intricate counterpoint atop Afro-Uruguayan candombe and Argentinian tango. She brings her…
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