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A review of The Way It Wasn’t by James Laughlin

The cover is a beauty with an autographed picture of the author and the title in typescript below it. The inside matches the outside and consists of a generous selection of appropriate or simply beautiful photographs and artwork. It is…

A review of The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

The Unknown Terrorist is being sold as a Trojan Horse of a thriller masquerading the seriousness of the societal critique it provides, but even that statement is a Trojan Horse. At the core of this novel is a nihilism so bleak, that it makes even the horror of the terrorist act, of murder and suicide, seem minor in comparison. It’s almost the complete opposite of the joyous affirmative humour which underpins Gould’s Book of Fish, and except for the occasional forays into stunning prose, it’s hard to believe this is the same author.

Images of Women: Beyonce’s B’Day

Beyonce, like Diana Ross before her, knows of the many women performers who have preceded her own arrival on the public stage, and has offered compliments to them: and Beyonce is trying to place herself in a flattering locale within that tradition and that ambition involves manners and methods dangerous, enriching, exciting, and easy to misunderstand.

A review of Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann

I think of German writers – unlike Musil or Joseph Roth, both of Austria – as hard and gnarly with long involved sentences and a gloomy outlook. Kehlmann’s lightness of touch is exceptional. He is a quietly witty writer with…

The Ordinary Lives of Intelligent People: Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister

Boredom and pleasure and violence seem the boundaries of the experiences described in several songs. A girl in “If You’re Feeling Sinister” is described thusly: “She was into S&M and bible studies.” (It is to laugh—or weep: the contradictions are less immoral than merely telling: and they tell of contradictory human impulses so strong that each aspect cannot destroy the other but may reinforce somehow the other.)

A review of Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott

Scott has written a splendid book. It’s clever, fairly glitters with cleverness, but it also better than that, and is a book that will appeal to every perceptive reader. Reviewed by Bob Williams Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott Back…

A review of Decreation by Anne Carson

But it is the close interconnections in the book (after another section of relatively autonomous poems) that pose major fascinations for the reader as she makes connections of times and places, bringing together in harmony ideas and persons that are…

Fresh Vision, New Sounds: Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash in a Digital Urn

Does one affirm, then move toward, truth over lie, love over hate, and life over death? (How to make these—and other—choices dynamic, vivid? Present them in art—in books, dance, film, music, painting, and theater. How to emphasize that dualities such as life and death are deeply bound? Explore philosophy.)