Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Columbia University Press
Book Review: “Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik” — The Evolution of a Radical Thinker
A powerfully relevant study about an iconoclastic Black thinker and poet who was dedicated to economic reform as well as the eradication of racism.
Book Review: “Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD”
The book’s conceit is that D.A. Miller watches films he’s seen earlier in life with enhanced perception because of the possibilities offered him through the DVD lens.
Book Review: “Woe from Wit” — A Great Russian Drama, Newly Translated
One of the masterpieces of Russian drama is done justice in a English version that successfully captures much of the wit and fluency of the original.
Book Review: “Klotsvog” — Confusion Reigns Supreme
Klotsvog ends up being a fascinating literary failure. Good for academics, but bad for readers.
Book Review: “Necropolis” — A Book of the Russian Literary Dead
This memoir offers an invaluable, broad look at intellectual Russia before and after the revolutions of 1917.
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.