Yale-University-Press

Book Review: Drama Queen — The Theatrical Nature of Elizabethan England

January 24, 2015
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To his credit, Garry Wills does not attempt to tell us what Shakespeare or his contemporaries “really meant,” nor does he suggest that there are ways that these plays ought be staged.

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Book Review: Into the Labyrinth of Fragmentary Memories — The Novels of Patrick Modiano

November 19, 2014
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The prose of Patrick Modiano, this year’s Nobel prizewinner, has a distinctive French style whose directness and grammatical limpidity by no means exclude semantic depth and complexity.

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Book Review: “In Certain Circles” and “The Last Lover” — The Powerful and The Disappointing

September 22, 2014
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Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles is a stunning novel about class and marriage and power; Can Xue’s The Last Lover is a tedious surrealistic farce.

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Book Interview: David Albahari’s “Globetrotter” — The Postmodern Émigré Blues

September 18, 2014
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Serbian writer David Albahari’s fascination with uncertainty fuels a grim, sardonic tragi-comedy in which silence plays an elemental but enigmatic role.

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Fuse Book Review: “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs” — Chronicling the Thrill of Invention

August 29, 2014
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On more than one occasion in The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs Greil Marcus argues that the original recordings of some of his picks don’t hold a candle to their cover versions.

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Book Review: An Evocative Biography of Zionist Agitator and Writer Vladmir Jabotinsky

July 27, 2014
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There’s room to wonder if Vladmir Jabotinsky would have accepted Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu as his legitimate Zionist heirs.

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Book Review: The “Jewish Lives” Series — Biography Simplified But Illuminating

June 27, 2014
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YUP’s uneven Jewish Lives offers a series of short, accessible biographies that could become a significant literary mural, showcasing the scope of Jewish culture.

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Book Review: Pierre Michon and his Many Artistic “Lives”

March 31, 2014
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The books are bleak in that Pierre Michon provides no reassuring, idealistic view of the creative urge. Art leads to no transcendence, no permanent uplifting sentiment. Making poems or making pictures is a rough daily business.

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Book Review: Art Historian Bernard Berenson — Reinvention as the American Dream

January 19, 2014
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Cohen devotes little space to Bernard Berenson’s art historical methodology, now largely superseded by modern approaches. She relates Berenson’s less admirable qualities without judging them.

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Visual Arts Review: Fine and Dandy at RISD

May 18, 2013
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The influence of two centuries of dandies on fashion — and the artful, strategic, ready-for-the-paparazzi self-presentation at the heart of modern celebrity — is on wide-ranging and colorful display in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum exhibit.

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