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Daniel Arasse’s method has been defined by his students as “looking, [taking] pleasure and [being] imprudent.” Any and every detail of a work of art can serve as his starting point.
Read MoreIn “Some Day,” Shemi Zarhin has masterfully woven together a tangle of bittersweet tales and elusive dreams. it is a book that is a pleasure to read and reread.
Read MoreRefreshingly, playwright Marianna Salzmann manages to be political without being didactic. Her characters live (rather than preach) through history, grappling with the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
Read MoreIf Patrizia Cavalli’s poetry is egocentric, even probably autobiographical, its narrator shows a detachment enabling her to observe herself from one remove, even when she describes herself in the élans of attraction.
Read MorePerhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.
Read More“The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra” is a compelling celebration of art as a force of nature, a fragile yet indomitable demand for possibility despite the constraints of a torpid existence.
Read MoreDramatist Theresia Walser is careful to point out that these women did not merely benefit from the abuses of authoritarian power, but perpetrated many of them as well.
Read MoreFor those of you who have never read Marguerite Duras, “L’Amour” is an invigorating place to start.
Read MoreNabokov will become much more seriously playful about extinction and the nature of love in the increasingly complex fables to come. “The Tragedy of Mr. Morn” is his initial earnest fairy tale.
Read MorePoet José Ángel Valente deeply considered what kind of lyricism remains legitimate; that is, truthful, not deceptive; a song that moves us to truth, not a Siren’s song.
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