Sunday Morning! “Rudin” by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev’s first novel tells of a common type: the brilliant intellectual who could have changed the world, if only he’d get out of his own way.
Turgenev’s first novel tells of a common type: the brilliant intellectual who could have changed the world, if only he’d get out of his own way.
Because, like all great books on music, David Keenan is really writing about us, nudging us in the ribs, and saying Hey, do you remember…
It’s hard to write about the South. Harry Crews’s first novel took a tone somewhere between the Grand Guignol and the Grand Ole’ Opry.
Germinal by Émile Zola, meanwhile, is a sort of fever dream of hell on earth that still hits hard, even if you’ve never set foot in a coal mine.
This recently-rediscovered novella is a chilling anomaly in dystopian fiction: here the censorious “they” feel no need to explain, justify, or announce themselves. We know them only by their hatreds.
In John Williams great work of Western Noir, the one-big-heist goes wrong and flawed men become most fully themselves in failure, like all of us
Gary Barwin is a writer of seemingly boundless energy and invention, and it does admittedly get a bit overwhelming at times.
David Rattray believed that poetry is a mystical language and the poet is a coyote smuggling us into the world of the spirit.
In this debut novel, “New Animal” by Ella Baxter, a mortuary artist deals with all of the messy unruliness of bodies and grief.
I chose The Cannibal by John Hawkes because it was on a table of writers who are generally considered the “real deal” by other writers.
If you’ve felt that a large chunk of your society has gone insane-or YOU have-there’s much you might relate to in the short stories of Shirley Jackson.
Maybe stories about the post-war suburban idyll only really work if they’re dark and Gothic and frightening and by Shirley Jackson
I did want to talk a little about the book “Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street ” by Preston Fassel, which just came out
William Lindsay Gresham heard a story he never forgot. Guillermo Del Toro’s recent adaptation of his “Nightmare Alley” is the latest verion
Maugham’s story “The Razor’s Edge” is about a WWI pilot who heads East seeking spiritual peace resonates even with those of us who haven’t gone very far on the path to sainthood.
Two visions of pleasure travel from Laurence Sterne and Michel Houellebecq 230 years apart, offer two very different ideas of being-in-the-word.
It’s a cameo role as memorable as Brando’s is “Apocalypse Now.” It’s also the exact point at which Lynch’s masterpiece seems closest to tipping over into genuine madness.
On a recent trip to New York City, a David Wojnarowicz booklet from 1989, and the artist as explosive device.
Seconds is an existential horror movie scarier than any B-movie slasher- they can only kill you once; this film suggests you can be killed so surely long before that physical death is only an afterthought.
“Jacket Weather” by Mike DeCapite is an elegiac meditation on love and aging in New York with two lovers who could talk all night.