MINDFUL PLEASURES

After starting and quickly abandoning The Savage Detectives a few months ago, I had an intimation that I would be returning to the book in ...

One of the rare highpoints in Hemingway's published correspondence is his 28 May 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Forget your ...

The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer, The Yiddish Policemen's Union earned reams of good reviews, but in my opinion ...

"Each day of life is an unrepeatable chord of a music that laughs at death." --Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind ( Memory of F...

Autumn of the Patriarch , while not as surrealistically inventive as One Hundred Years of Solitude , is a great novel in its own right and d...

I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s the Great Columbian Novel, a fact often obscured or missed by North...

Having read the first two books of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel , I find the work tedious, monotonous, redundant, tiresome, boring, so...

A brief thought about a book that cannot be thought of briefly: Moby Dick is the American Bible, the only canonical New American Testament....

When I first saw Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour "full text" version of Hamlet during its initial theatrical release in 1996, I was...

Pater's Renaissance is one of my Bibles. Specifically , it's my Pentateuch. Joyce's Ulysses is my New Testament, Gravity's...

Geoff Dyer is a wanker. Anyone who has read his dire book of travel pieces, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It , knows just ...

Hamlet and Twelfth Night were made for each other. Probably written around the same time (yes, my 'probably' covers a multitude of...

Oh boy... This is the book in which Samuel Delany , never one to fly his freak flag at half-staff, runs that sucker all the way up the pole,...

Strindberg's 6-page play The Stronger , a work that exerted an obvious influence on Ingmar Bergman's film Persona , is a smaller and...

Anyone who comes to Annette Insdorf's book in search of incisive, challenging criticism of Kieslowski's works should look elsewher...

On this July 3, as America tunes up for its annual day of self- congratulatory symphonies, allow me to pre - emptively piss on the parades...

I'm attempting to source the following quote attributed to Elias Canetti: "Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates....

Yes it is yes it's Bloomsday again, and if you don't like it, you can K.M.R.I.A.... Neither stately nor plump nor Buck Mulligan, I ...

How good is this book? Just follow this link over to Amazon.com and buy yourself a copy. Right now. It's that good. (Alternatively, go...

If no one has yet used the word 'decadent' to describe Bruno Schulz's prose, allow me to be the first. I have defined 'decad...

Mark Rosenthal's Anselm Kiefer , the catalogue to the Art Institute of Chicago's 1987 Kiefer retrospective, is an average exhibiti...