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By Bill Marx Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility. Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.
Read MoreBy Liao Yiwu, Wen Huang, and Bill Marx Each time a disaster hits China, we all become refugees and strangers in our own land. — Liao Yiwu Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, 50, revisits the earthquake damaged Gu Temple in the town of Jiezi in the Sichuan Province. He was interviewing May 12th survivors for his…
Read MoreSometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. Anne Carson, in her introduction to her translation of Euripides’ “Orestes” in “An Oresteia.”…
Read MoreWidening literary perspectives is admirable, but as the festival matures somebody at PEN has to decide what World Voices is supposed to be. By Bill Marx My admittedly small sampling of the 5th Anniversary of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York last week left me feeling baffled. I attended seven…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Richard Pittman ends the 40th season of the Boston Musica Viva on a strong note. Back in 1969, Richard Pittman founded the Boston Musica Viva (BMV), the first local ensemble dedicated entirely to contemporary music. On May 1, Pittman and his colleagues wound up their 40th season with a concert of three…
Read MoreJames Toback’s new documentary about boxer Mike Tyson explores a demonic urgency that fattens on the destruction of others. By Harvey Blume At the end of “Tyson,” James Toback’s documentary about him, the ex-heavyweight champ, now 43 years old, breathes heavily and falls silent. He seems talked out, and is certainly, by his own admission,…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Back for a return visit to Symphony Hall on April 22 was the National Philharmonic of Russia (NPR), founded in 2003 and not to be confused with the 19-year-old Russian National Orchestra. On the podium for this Celebrity Series event was violin virtuoso Vladimir Spivakov, who will turn 65 in September and…
Read MoreBy Anna Razumnaya An erudite, absorbing, and often very funny account of Russia’s pathological inability to condemn the Communist Party. Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia, by Jonathan Brent. Atlas & Co. Publishers, 335 pages A certain jealous vigilance is to be expected when a Russian reads a book about Russia written by…
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