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“Before I Burn” gives the reader the awesome sense of a fully perceived life—the hallmark of great art.
A collection of poems and essays by the admired German poet Gottfried Benn, who, because of his brief association with Nazism, has been absent from our mainstream, non-specialized, English-language view of modern German poetry.
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.
In “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.
Refreshingly, 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.
If 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.
Perhaps 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.
“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.
Dramatist 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.
For those of you who have never read Marguerite Duras, “L’Amour” is an invigorating place to start.
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