This memoir offers an invaluable, broad look at intellectual Russia before and after the revolutions of 1917.
Columbia University Press
Poetry Review: The Golden Age of Russian Poetry — Revisited
Here, then, are two books that provide a fine literary introduction to one of the richest flowerings of poetry in European culture.
Book Review: Punk Rock and Poetry — The Record Corrected
There was an entire “New York School” that the punks were inspired by and a part of, whether they always wanted to be or not.
Book Review: “Rapture” — Modernism, Daredevil Style
Rapture is a worthwhile curio that grapples, entertainingly, with Modernism’s artistic, structural, and revolutionary quandaries.
Book Interview: Natsume Sōseki — A Century After the Death of a Literary Giant
Maybe finally we’re reaching the Natsume Sōseki moment in the English-speaking world.
Book Review: A Complicated Story — Noh Theater and Modernism
Carrie J. Preston refuses to characterize these cultural exchanges in moralistic or narrowly political terms.
Book Review: A Superb Biography of French Filmmaker Éric Rohmer
The publication of de Baecque and Herpe’s wonderful biography needs to be followed in the USA by a complete Éric Rohmer retrospective.
Book Review: “When Movies Were Theater” — Exploring Where We Watch the Movies
If you are interested in how the architecture within American movie houses shaped the cinema and vice-versa, this often brilliant tome is an instant classic.
Book Review: The Humanist Cinema of Taiwanese Director Hou Hsiao-hsien — Nothing But the Essential
An exciting complement to the new book is a traveling retrospective of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, a rare opportunity to see 19 of the director’s movies shown on 35mm film: at Cambridge’s Harvard Film Archive through November 2.
World Books Update
By Bill Marx You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is. Two more pieces on international fiction for World Books, the feature I edit for PRI’s The World.