Reviews of books, music, film and other bits of culture
Picture this: a secluded scientist waits in a checkout line for his new love interest to return with an item. An unusual pickup for him, she had invaded his radio interview about bird flu (he's an expert) and then asked him to bed when they had drinks.
Antonio Pietrangeli's 1960 film Adua and her Friends (Adua e le Compagne) explores the end of an era and points to future cultural upheaval.
Andrew Rossi's Page One: Inside the NYTimes looks to newspapers long past their heydey.
Many recent films have brought historical verity to narratives clouded in myth.
Those who love hearing fashion discussed as serious art will love this documentary, a portrait of the late iconic French designer, Yves Saint Laurent.
The stories in A.L. Kennedy’s What Becomes seem driven by two entities: the author’s brain and her prose appendage. The latter is so alive it appears to possess a separate language pulse. In heightened moments Kennedy uses language to bind thought to physical sensation, which in turn stimulates a replicated response in the brain of the reader. This simulated experience is what makes her stories so striking and also intense.
In an occasionally polemical and highly impassioned voice, Edith Grossman advances the most brilliant and persuasive arguments for the absolute importance of literary translation I have ever encountered.
Zadie Smith, the prodigiously gifted English novelist, seems to have been caught in the tangle of literary debate from the beginning.
Credit should be given for putting a long overdue spotlight on this atrocious chapter of 20th century history.
The most significant aspect here is reinventing Wonderland as a warped parallel universe to Victorian England
