Nuttall uses wit and personal recollections to illuminate his text. The result is lively and relaxed although he makes no concessions to difficulties. His explanations are cogent and full. As a book by a writer worth reading for his own sake and as one of the dozen books that any reader of Shakespeare should have, this is not only an essential book, it is a delight.
A review of Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
Some time ago, I read an interview with Norman Mailer where he made the claim that staring at Cubist paintings was good for his eyesight. I forget Mailer’s argument, but I’d make a similar claim regarding Patricia Highsmith: her novels can sooth your nerves. If you are entering a troubling period in your life, read Highsmith.
A review of Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Anthea Bell’s translation reads extremely well. She has given us an elaborate, sophisticated English prose that brings out all of Zweig’s literary art and emotional subtlety. Overall, Amok and Other Stories represents a splendid selection of Stefan Zweig’s short fiction, with the added frisson that these stories share a correspondence with the writer’s own tragic fate.
Experiments Conducted: Burnt Sugar’s More Than Posthuman, and Not April in Paris, and Blood on the Leaf
The path to success, whether small or large success, can be paved by inheritance or by luck, but, it seems to me, it is most usually preceded by hope, intelligence, passion, discipline, and a plan, as well as resources. Burnt Sugar is to be commended for pursuing a path its members, apparently, consider vital to themselves, a journey that a small audience in different parts of the world has decided to share with the band.
Courage, Compromise, and Corruption: A Weekend in the City, by the band Bloc Party, featuring Kele Okereke
A Weekend in the City is a sketch, if not a map, of the contemporary moment and of London, a sketch of the modern city; and it is a musical recording with very public ambitions and a private heart. The development of culture, knowledge, and technology in a city are the basis of its modernism; and that culture, knowledge, and technology are ever growing, ever tested: and tested by each life, and by the diversity and the weight of all the lives, to be found within it.
A review of Another by Joel Deane
The community of Another is a bleak one to be sure—a distopia which is all too real. Death is everywhere, and those that hurt you most are those who should be protecting you. The community is empty and disfunctional, and everyone we meet is poor, damaged, and full of ugly pain and scars. It isn’t pretty, but somehow Deane’s exquisite writing contains beauty that transcends its setting, and hope which goes beyond the unhappy ending.
Interview with Phil LaMarche
The author of American Youth talks about his novel and its positive reception, cultural differences in perception, his characters, his narrative voice, the relationship between teaching and writing, his literary influences, on filming his work, his next project, and more.
A review of American Youth by Phil LaMarche
American Youth is a perfectly rendered novel which manages that difficult balance between absolute topicality—this is a novel for our times—and timeless beauty. This is both a classic piece of literature and an important chronicle of a generation desperate to get out of a downward spiral.
A review of Stranger Than Fiction
However absurd the premise is, Stranger than Fiction is completely believable. However ridiculous the characters are, every one is absolutely realistic and multi-dimensional. Stranger than Fiction is a wonderful film, as easy on the eye and brain as any Hollywood blockbuster, but like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind manages to leave the viewer with more than they arrived with.
Cuban Pianist, International Treasure: Bebo Valdés
t is a mastery, elegant and elegiac, of the “the cultivated and the popular,” in an album of “thirteen pieces exemplifying Cuba’s major musical genres, starting with the emergence of a recognizably Cuban music in the mid-19th century,” in which the songs “are presented more or less chronologically—contradanza, danza, danzón, bolero, guaguancó,” an album that promises to become a pleasure and a defining reference for others, as much as it has been a joy for pianist Bebo Valdés.