From the monthly archives: September 2009
Come the High Holidays, as previously mentioned, I re-read certain books; the cycle is repeated around Passover. This year's High Holiday season gave me more time than usual to contemplate my personal canon of Jewish literature. My thinking was further prodded by reading in the New York Times of the death of Paul Rudnick's mother. [...]
Continue Reading →Henrik Ibsen’s dramas are classics of the theater, and his best-known plays lay bare the stultifying social mores of the late 19th century: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler. The later Ibsen, while still based in the naturalism of his main period, moves toward drama that is more symbolic, perhaps even allegorical -- dramas [...]
Continue Reading →The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among [...]
Continue Reading →I have to confess I’m not a great admirer of the short story. The form is too anecdotal for me, I guess. My lack of enthusiasm seems due to the fact that my acquaintance with the characters in the story will be too brief to be worth my attention. And I usually just find myself [...]
Continue Reading →My wife works for the New Haven Public Library system, and several years ago she asked me if I would please lead an after-hours book club once a month at the Mitchell branch in Westville. There had been several requests from patrons for such a book club, but she had not yet found anyone willing [...]
Continue Reading →We all have a lot of questions about what happened to Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who went missing a few days before her wedding and whose body was found stuffed in the ceiling of a Yale laboratory. Now that her killer has been apprehended and will be brought to trial, one question [...]
Continue Reading →By April Bernard (Norton)
To last as a Romantic, April Bernard says in a recent interview, “You have to be wise and passionate.” In her fourth book of poems passion and wisdom contend for the soul of Art.
Her Romantic suffers, feeling more, about more:
. . . it was the tree [...]
Continue Reading →A number of threads in my life wove themselves together in recent days and it was all about shopping downtown.
The New Yorker ran an article by Patricia Marx that name-checked the old punk boutique Bonnie and Clyde—it was on Chapel Street, I think in the space where Wave Gallery is now. The article [...]
Continue Reading →By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)
One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do [...]
Continue Reading →I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday; as that festival invited the organizers of Comic-Con to join then, I was lucky enough to be on a panel—along with fellow authors Peter V. Brett, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, and Dave Roman—about New York, science fiction, and fantasy. As any good panel should, the session quickly [...]
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