Like most first novels by a gifted writer, the abundance of invention and everything that goes with it is overwhelming. It’s impossible to fault a writer for this. Her next book may be more spare and controlled but it…
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A review of Indian Love Poetry by A.L. Dallapiccola
This is a well-proportioned book with illustrations to accompany every excerpt of poetry. The illustrations come from a different time (seventeenth to nineteenth century) than the poems, some of which date from as early as the fifth century of our…
An interview with Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark)
Donald Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark) has been writing fiction for close to half a century now, and his achievements have garnered many accolades. Significantly, his admirers include many writers among their ranks. John Banville has called him “one of the great writers of the twentieth century” while for James Sallis he is simply “a great American writer”. The Mystery Writers of America honoured Donald Westlake with a Grand Master Award in 1993.
Excellence, Three Ladies of Song: Ella Fitzgerald’s Best of the Song Books, Diana Ross’s Blue, and Natalie Cole’s Leavin’
Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Nancy Wilson are singers whose works contain more than three colors in their palette, singers whose voices are capable of sounding more than tones of anger, lust, and pain, singers whose work is…
A review of Until I Find You by John Irving
Clearly John Irving is a talented writer, whose extensive research is matched by his extensive knowledge. It’s just a shame he doesn’t have a trusted editor willing to insist that Irving cut the ridiculous quantity of fluff out of his…
In the Shadow of the Past: John Legend, Once Again
The themes of John Stephens’s songs are variations on romance, and the songs resist cliché to the extent that they are imaginative or realistic, as the need (or case) may be. The collection’s first song—in which the singer asks someone…
A review of Fresh News from the Arctic by Libby Hart
Libby Hart’s Fresh News From The Arctic is a small but significant collection of poetry that is engaging, thought-provoking, sometimes wryly humorous, and that demands reading and rereading to uncover the delicate nuances hidden so artfully within its language. Reviewed by Liz…
Troubadour: Eric Bibb’s A Ship Called Love
Beauty is not always simple, and brilliance and excellence are not simple. The relationship of one kind of ethic to another—for instance, an ethic founded in reason, science and civil liberties versus a religious ethic—is not simple. By Daniel Garrett…
A review of Border Town by Hillel Wright
Wright excels at the exploration of popular culture. He writes well of comix, jazz, and the media. He is still enough of a hippy to deplore the world’s sad path to a reactionary and repressive right. He is not only…
A review of The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
As Nathan’s own book of follies grows in an almost Rabelasian style, there are botched attempts at love and lust, outrageous names like “Marina Luisa Sanchez Gonzalez”, a physical and metaphysical quest towards a fictional construct called the “Hotel Existence”,…