Books
387 results
Page 36
Mary Sue Welsh's "One Woman in a Hundred'
She didn't sleep her way to the top
Edna Phillips was the first female principal player in any major symphony orchestra. She worshipped Stokowski (who hired her) and despised Ormandy (who made passes at her).
Articles
3 minute read
Marcel Proust, poet
… And he wrote poetry, too!
It probably shouldn't come as a shock that Marcel Proust set his hand to writing verse. His poems about great artists of the past are pleasant but unremarkable— no better or worse than those of his Symbolist contemporaries.
Articles
2 minute read
Mary Roach cruises the alimentary canal
There's something about Mary
Mary Roach is to writers what the Mütter Museum is to museums. She joyfully mines human taboos, from human cadavers to feces to the alimentary canal, and consequently seems to have cornered a lucrative market.
Articles
5 minute read
A Dan Hoffman memory
To him, Whitman was more than a bridge
The late Dan Hoffman, my favorite Philadelphia poet, was the kind of poet that Walt Whitman asked Americans to cherish.
Articles
2 minute read
Andrei Codrescu's "Bibliodeath'
Requiem for the printed word
Andrei Codrescu grew up in Communist Romania, where printed words were deemed more dangerous than bombs. Now he lives in a virtual world inundated with too many instantly disposable virtual words. Ah, but he has a solution.
Articles
5 minute read
Jim Quinn's "Waiting For the Wars to End'
What did you do in the war (and don't ask which one)?
The former food and language critic Jim Quinn now writes unflinching yet tender characterizations of people slogging through life. Both of these stories are sadly funny and horrifically real.
Articles
3 minute read
Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon' revisited
Into the wild, then and now: Setting boundaries, and pushing them
In Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon emulates his protagonists by pushing new boundaries and venturing into unknown realms, both loony and profound, in the process risking not his life but his reputation and his worshipful constituency. It's a great novel; and I say this without having understood any more than, oh, 10 percent of it.
A trio of new poetry translations
Nabokov meets his match
The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a poet too, as his latest collection reminds us. Two other late European poets, also blessed with recent translations, may be worth even more of your attention.
Articles
3 minute read
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Verlaine and Trakl, complete at last
Second life for two Symbolists
Here is a pair of worthy possibilities for the poetry-lover in your life: A complete work by Verlaine and a first-time ever translation of Trakl's early poems and dramatic works into English.
Articles
2 minute read
Two French Symbolists in new translation
What's old is new again
Hats off to translator Brian Stableford and Black Coat Press for presenting American readers with a world of new 19th-Century French fiction not seen here since the 1920s.
Articles
3 minute read