Sunday Morning! “What is Art?” by Leo Tolstoy
We’re not all Christian anarchists like Leo Tolstoy, but he’s not exactly wrong about how art eases our sense of isolation.
Category: Sunday
Sunday Morning! Leonora Carrington, the Complete Stories
Like fairy tales for mad children, the stories of Leonora Carrington are as packed with strangeness and complete imaginative freedom as her paintings.
Sunday! “Assembling a Black Counter Culture” by DeForrest Brown Jr.
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.
Sunday Morning! “Severance”
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
Sunday Morning! Gord Lewis and “Teenage Head”
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.
Sunday Morning! “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox
Desperate Characters, a rediscovered classic about two people whose lives would be ideal, if they had any meaning.
Sunday Morning! “Pierre and Jean” by Guy de Maupassant
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.
Sunday Morning! “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward
I wanted to write about Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones for a few reasons, including its recent challenge in North Carolina schools
Sunday Morning: “Bad Day at Black Rock” by John Sturges
Bad Day at Black Rock is one film that straddles genres: its setting is Western and its storyline is noir.
Sunday Morning! “Modern Love” by Constance DeJong
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.
Sunday Morning! “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead
In recent weeks, Colson Whitehead has become the writer who leaves me thinking “Man, how does he get his novels to go like that?!”
Sunday Morning! “Berg” by Ann Quin
Berg seems to go through a crisis of his own. Does he really want to kill this stranger? Or does he want to seduce the man’s mistress?
Sunday Morning! “Voices in the Evening” by Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg’s prose captures the stark, fragmented absurdity of life after the cataclysm of Fascism: everything is right there, but how do we engage with it?
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.
Sunday Morning! “This is Memorial Device” by David Keenan
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…
Sunday Morning! “The Gospel Singer” by Harry Crews
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.
Sunday! “Germinal” by Émile Zola
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.
Sunday Morning! “They” by Kay Dick
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.
Sunday Morning! “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams
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
Sunday Morning! “Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted” by Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin is a writer of seemingly boundless energy and invention, and it does admittedly get a bit overwhelming at times.
