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Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel explores a future that’s already happened. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf) By Liza Weisstuch In the popular imagination, science fiction novels are supposed to be set in the future, anywhere from two years ahead to centuries. Often, these stories ruminate on how the latest technology changes humanity and…
Read MoreThe Decemberists’ album offers a lineup of tunes that would soothe Shakespeare on a balmy evening.
Read MoreOld recordings of classical music may have less to teach us than many critics think. By Mark Kroll It has been more than 100 years since the first wax cylinder scratched out a reproduction of someone screaming into a megaphone, but classical music recordings still “can’t get no respect.” A common lament has been that,…
Read MoreAlbanian writer reflects on winning the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
Read MoreBy Debra Cash Tap superstar Savion Glover effortlessly bridges the jazz and rap generations. Improvography is a word coined by the late Gregory Hines. Neologisms are about grabbing the power to make definitions; they assert that language is not specific or expressive enough to make your meaning clear. When tap dancer Savion Glover uses “Improvography”…
Read MoreA new novel by a Chinese dissident provides a comically stinging vision of his homeland.
Read MoreA new book gives a philosophical analysis of American culture’s obsession with nonsense.
Read MoreBy Debra Cash A retrospective chronicles the four-decade career of radical dance giant Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002 at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in Cambridge, MA What Rainer has been doing isn’t hard to see, as long as it isn’t theorized into academic incomprehensibility. Over time she has been called a…
Read MoreA novel by a Nobel prize-winner from Iceland presents a journey into the center of a resolutely antic imagination.
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Visual Arts Review: Cartoon Memoirist
By Milo Miles Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi continues to expand the art of the comic book. Back in the ’40s, the long-standing prejudice that comic books were incapable of presenting serious, adult matters was exploded by such artists as Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner. But the discovery of how just how uniquely valuable…
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