One wonders what it takes to staunch the hemorrhaging of originality from cultural conversation—in this case, the overuse of Yadda-Yadda-Nation this or Blah-Blah-Planet that? The clichéd title being the only complaint I can raise with this compendium of 29 dissident texts entitled Protest Nation: Words
Siglio Press’s publication of Torture of Women, created by renowned (feminist) artist Nancy Spero, who died in 2009, is the reiteration in well-designed and printed book form of her 1976 creation. Originally a 125-foot work “juxtaposing testimony by female victims of torture with startling imagery from the
The notion of considering the happiness of the citizenry is not a particularly novel one (think Jeremy Bentham), though the burgeoning of happiness research appears to be a growth industry. These days the disaffected white people who are holding various anti-something-or-other rallies around the country seem to
One might view tinkering with the Homeric epics a foolish endeavor or a brave effort—in any case, it is not a project lacking in ambition. Young Zachary Mason’s debut novel (if that is what this book is), The Lost Books of the Odyssey (FSG), envisions Odysseus’s tale
Perhaps it is inevitable that a giant like the Nobel laureate and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda suffers posthumous paper cuts at the hands of academic scolds such as Ilan Stavans (who mocks and scorns the poet as a Stalinist stooge). Happily, we have also been graced with the posthumous publication
Though I am not convinced that most writers’ lives are particularly interesting, there is no dearth of biographies of writers nor is the supply of new offerings dwindling. There is a subset of field of inquiry that examines the lives of a writers identified with a literary clique or cadre—
In my world, the build-up and anticipation for David Simon’s crew’s new creation Treme was hypertensive, culminating with the airing of the first episode on Sunday last. Perhaps the wider universe was preoccupied with the foibles of an errant golfer and hopefully paying some attention as the
My personal ambivalence regarding artistic awards and other swimsuit contests (e.g., the Oscars, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Nobel) is summed up by Pulitzer-winner Gail Caldwell’s observation “that the prize didn’t mean much until you win it.” I am in no danger of winning one of
Dwight Garner, who is a devoted book person, reader, and a columnist for the New YorkTimes, has assembled and annotated a compendium of 300 book ballyhoos, entitled Read Me: A Century of Classic Book Advertisements (Ecco). I had this tome buried in one of those K-2’s of books
I know novelist Cathleen Schine (The New Yorkers) to be a talented and amusing writer, but somehow I have never been attracted to her stories. Her new novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport (FSG), is reportedly an homage to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—which makes me wonder what
