Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
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Poetry Review: Writer Alain Mabanckou — Taking Life Both to Heart and in Stride
Take a dive into any of Alain Mabanckou’s works in English — and definitely score a copy of the new translation, As Long As Trees Take Root In the Earth, beautifully crafted and bound. Vive la Poesie!
Book Review: “The Communicating Vessels” — Incommunicado
The late Friederike Mayröcker’s über-recognizable style has become a brand, logoed by certain objects: violets, lilacs, birds
Book Review: “Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home”
Endpapers is an invaluable gift to literature, mainly but not only for the quotations, details, and beguilingly written scenes of publisher Kurt Wolff’s life scattered throughout
Arts Feature: Recommended Books, 2020
An eclectic round-up of the favorite books of the year from our critics.
Book Review: “Kraft” — A Pitch Perfect Satire of Neoliberal Dreamin’
A powerful allegory for our techno-crazed, consumption-addicted, soul-crushing times.
Book Review: “The Turncoat” and “Marrow and Bone” — Two Revealing Looks at World War II
For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
Book Review: “Tyll” — The Thirty Years War, From a Prankster’s Point of View
Daniel Kehlmann’s narrative gift is so prodigious as to be almost aggravating.
Book Review: “Old Rendering Plant” — Existence on Trial
Hilbig’s prose demands sentence-by sentence commitment. It gravitates to the dark and dense, and occasionally surreal.
Book Review: “To the Back of Beyond” — Extreme Ambiguity
Evidently, plain-spoken language plus doubt and apprehension equate to novels that, once opened, are very hard to put down.