fiction

Boston Noir: A Grimy Ride Through the Dark Side of Beantown

January 15, 2010
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This enjoyable anthology of crime stories proffers a grimy ride through the murderous and creepy side of Beantown. Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane. Akashic Books, $15.95 Reviewed by Kate Vander Wiede In the introduction of Boston Noir, editor, contributor. and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane explains that while Aristotle “mandated that a tragic hero must…

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Critical Condition: The Book Review Blues

January 10, 2008
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ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.

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Book Review: “Zugzwang”and the Pleasures of Chess Noir

December 30, 2007
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By Harvey Blume Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages) It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I…

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Book Review: John Twelve Hawks

August 16, 2007
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A few years ago, an adolescent boy with whom I liked to discuss books told me about a novel he had read called, The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks. The book, I found, was absorbing, a real page-turner.j It was about a group of Travelers, endowed with the ability to move among a set of…

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Book Review: Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark” — Dead Tired

July 12, 2007
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By Bill Marx In his critically acclaimed novels and stories, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami sings of the subterranean connections between software and the supernatural. After Dark (Knopf, 191 pp, $22.95) Haruki Murakami is a hip cultural diagnostician who would like to be viewed as a melancholic poet of the postmodern condition, a writer who has…

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Don Juan — Philosopher of Love

May 22, 2007
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A conversation with Douglas Carlton Abrams, author of the erotically-charged novel “The Lost Diary of Don Juan: An Account of the True Arts of Passion and the Perilous Adventure of Love.” By Bill Marx Readers looking for a retread of Errol Flynn’s antics as the infamous lover will be disappointed — though not grievously so,…

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