Grappling with one’s identity — complicated by the relationships between tradition and modernism, cultural history and the process of assimilation — is central to most of Sherman Alexie’s stories, and his exploration of these complexities is compelling and illuminating.
American
Poetry Review: Jane Shore’s “That Said” — Early and Late
If the poems in “That Said: New and Selected Poems” had been ordered differently, the volume would have made more of its virtues.
Book Appreciation: Novelist and Short Story Writer John Cheever At 100 — America’s Chekhov?
May 27th marked what would have been the one-hundredth anniversary of writer John Cheever’s birth. (He was born in Quincy, MA.) June 18th marks the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Fiction Review: “So There!” — Nicole Louise Reid’s Poetic Chick Lit
“So There!” comes off as a poetic species of chick lit, its female characters desperate to break deadly dull routines, longing for more (not even sure what), but generally expecting the doorway to redemption —- a passage figuratively filled with light in their imaginations -— to be a man.
Visual Arts Feature: Me and Philip Guston
Our discussions always took the same turn. Philip Guston attempted to convince me that artists like Piero della Francesca and the cave painters of Lascaux were in the first place abstractionists.
Poetry Review: Henri Cole’s “Touch” — Love Thy Neighbor, Like Thyself
Is it true that if I love my neighbor I can, or will, like myself? This question cuts to the heart of the poems in Heni Cole’s volume “Touch,” and the answer is yes.
Book Review: Denis Johnson’s Beautiful, Haunting “Train Dreams”
In “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.
Visual Arts Review: Hinging Between Worlds — Paintings by Anne Leone
Each of the paintings in Anne Leone’s Cenote Series shows the water’s surface, always from below. The world of air is invisible to us, off limits, mysterious. This membrane between worlds appears closed, but is easily pierced by the swimmers, resealing itself each time they rise and plunge.
Film Review: Should We Fear Miranda July’s “Future”?
THE FUTURE, director/actor Miranda July’s followup to 2005’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is brave, unexpectedly poignant and devastatingly sad.
Fuse Theater Review: The Apple Pie Beauty of “reasons to be pretty”
Now that dramatist Neil LaBute’s scripts are being produced on Broadway he has fanned the earlier whiffs of amorality in his work away. The obscene language and provocative hooks remain, but those are not a bar to popular success (think of David Mamet).