Sunday Morning! What is Literature? A little on Sven Birkerts
We now interrupt your scheduled arrival for a brief existential crisis. (Or, maybe, it’s just like that for me.)
We now interrupt your scheduled arrival for a brief existential crisis. (Or, maybe, it’s just like that for me.)
If living in this world nearly overwhelmed Richard Hambleton, his paintings still have the power to nearly overwhelm this world.
In Adele Bertei’s novelistic memoir, a Dickensian waif survives a rough childhood and recreates herself as a queer “stud,” a poet, and a performer through the saving grace of music.
A recent book on the art world did not exactly rock mine. But “Leaving Brooklyn” from 1989- that’s the one you’ve gotta read.
If you haven’t seen a Bergman picture, I’d start with Wild Strawberries. It’s one of his most accessible masterworks, and its reputation has grown since its release 1957.
In his highly lauded novel “The Underground Railroad,” Colson Whitehead, rewires the creaky old machinery of the novel and finds it still able of reaching surprising new depths.
Magda Szabó published Katalin Street 20 years before The Door, and 10 years after being rehabilitated as a former “enemy of the state.”
This seems to be how Colette wrote her masterpiece novellas: Chéri and The End of Chéri: she had these two characters in mind
They always judge you. On Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s haunting novel about a housekeeper who loves and persecutes her employer in equal measure.
We’re not all Christian anarchists like Leo Tolstoy, but he’s not exactly wrong about how art eases our sense of isolation.
Like fairy tales for mad children, the stories of Leonora Carrington are as packed with strangeness and complete imaginative freedom as her paintings.
The rich and detailed story of “Assembling a Black Counter Culture” and how Detroit gave the world techno music and an alternative vision of the future to escape the exhausted white one.
Finally, I write about a streaming series – I watched the streaming series “Severance,” a surreal depiction of four very likeable human rats in a very unstimulating corporate cage pushing buttons
For a lot of Canadians, Gord Lewis played on the soundtrack of their youth. For me, he was the kind, quiet man in the bar with the radiant smile. All praise to the ones who showed us some kinda fun.
Desperate Characters, a rediscovered classic about two people whose lives would be ideal, if they had any meaning.
Guy de Maupassant’s classic novel is another in a long line of adulterous wife stories; but really, it’s about the deranging need to know.
I wanted to write about Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones for a few reasons, including its recent challenge in North Carolina schools
Bad Day at Black Rock is one film that straddles genres: its setting is Western and its storyline is noir.
A recovered Constance DeJong novel from late 70s NYC that overflows its banks and exhausts all possibilities without exhausting the reader like many experimental novels do.
In recent weeks, Colson Whitehead has become the writer who leaves me thinking “Man, how does he get his novels to go like that?!”
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