All fiction is fantasy according to Gaiman. This statement is too airy a wave of the hand. It amounts to no more than that only writers with imagination write stories. The combination of the real and the fantastic is not peculiar to Gaiman, but some writers make the combination with notable skill. There is no question in Gaiman’s work. He manages seamless documents for the most part.
A review of Chess Informant 97
Playing over top-quality games such as these, and studying the accompanying notes, provides the best possible grounding for finding out what modern chess is about, whether in the area of attack, defense or positional play. One can see what the best contemporary players are doing, acquire a good appreciation of their various styles and keep up to date with current opening theory as well.
A review of The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman
The Sonnet Lover is tightly plotted and skilfully executed, and would appeal particularly to lovers of literary sleuthing and academic intrigue, courtly poetry, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Venice and Florence, and readers familiar with the political wranglings that go on behind closed doors in universities.
A review of The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
Although this is a young woman’s story, it would be wrong to paint it as a ‘feminist narrative’. The strictures of life for women of strict Muslim cultures are well-known, but the author’s goal does not seem so much to point out the unfairness of the culture as to paint a portrait of a memorable and believable individual who learns how to prosper within these strictures – in other words this is an example of, in Joseph Campbell’s words, ‘a hero’s journey’.
Yes We Can Can: Our New Orleans 2005, featuring Allen Toussaint; and Harry Connick Jr.’s 2007 Oh My NOLA
Toussaint’s voice is softly inflected, masculine, and neither heavy nor light, somewhere in between, with a nice firmness and tone, and he sings “Yes We Can Can” supported by vivid percussion, amid an appealingly idiosyncratic rhythm. The song has become just weeks ago, and now, one of my favorites.
Instruments Made of Ice: Terje Isungset, Two Moons
Terje Isungset’s Two Moons is the kind of work that compels one to ask, What is music? Is it all sound, any sound? Is it whatever sound is intentionally made; and made by a self-described musician? Is it organized sound? Sound intended to be pleasing to the ear; or, simply, sound intended to be contemplated as music?
Time and Music and Love: Sugar Pie DeSanto’s Refined Sugar and Classic Sugar Pie
The collection Refined Sugar has the quick-beat, party song “Somebody Scream,” and the reflective and slow-beat “Life Goes On,” a song of the acceptance of disappointment, though there the narrator, the singer, is still wondering: “Maybe someday you’ll tell me why, why you had to hurt me,” a wondering that suggests an incomplete acceptance.
Romance and Modernism: Smokey Robinson, My World: The Ultimate Collection
Smokey Robinson’s music is not haunted or helmed in by gospel pieties, blues grievances, or social conflicts, but, instead, his music is the music of the open, questing spirit, the sensitive heart, the sensual body: a modern man, liberated, loving, and thoughtful.
The Beautiful Music of the Son of Ali Farka Toure: Vieux Farka Toure
I do not know the language, or languages, in which Vieux Farka Toure’s songs are written so I cannot discuss their meaning: I can only suggest something of what they sound like and their effect on one listener. This is music of many delicate notes, notes like softly splashing rain, refreshment for a dry season.
Last and First: Carl Hancock Rux’s Good Bread Alley and Rux Revue
Transcendence is not what Rux’s music offers: instead, in a world with spirits and no gods, one feels as if one has a companion for one’s journey, someone to share the struggles—and some of the pleasures—with.