| ( ! ) Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$media in /var/www/bookforum.com/prod/src/BookforumFrontendBundle/Controller/BlogController.php on line 161 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call Stack | ||||
| # | Time | Memory | Function | Location |
| 1 | 0.0000 | 363832 | {main}( ) | .../app.php:0 |
| 2 | 0.0018 | 491248 | AppKernel->handle( ) | .../app.php:49 |
| 3 | 0.0054 | 1038256 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle( ) | .../Kernel.php:201 |
| 4 | 0.0054 | 1038672 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:80 |
| 5 | 0.0187 | 2320792 | Bookforum\FrontendBundle\Controller\BlogController->listAction( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:158 |
Rilke has had plenty of remarkable translators, most famously, Stephen Mitchell. All have produced fine versions of Rilke’s unrelentingly intense and sculptural poems, but only Edward Snow has tuned his ear to most or all of Rilke’s body of work.
We should give thanks for Melanie Phillips, who writes for the right in a column for the Daily Mail here in the UK, and now has a book out in the US with Encounter Books (other new titles: How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security, How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting the US Economy, The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama’s Global Warming Agenda – which would make Phillips’s The World Turned Upside Down a really snappy title if it hadn’t already been taken by the Diggers, Christopher Hill and Chumbawamba).
Kenzaburo Oe's novel The Changeling (translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm) begins in a tried-and-true fashion: with a dead body and a suitcase of posthumous correspondence that may contain the secrets behind the tragedy. Internationally esteemed film director Goro Hanawa has leapt to his death from his Tokyo apartment window.
“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” And yet most times one does not. I was myself not moving—though the desire was there—when I met this sentence, the first in D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. In my case, moving meant reviewing The Thief of Time, not moving meant reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a book about the “serious business of putting off writing my study of [D.H. Lawrence].” And so it began, putting off writing by reading about putting off writing, all with a familiar irritation and indignation.
But The Thief of Time has to bear some of the blame. I went to it sure
With the title of his new survey, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, David B. Ruderman plunges into one of the central debates in the writing of Jewish history. For the most of the last 2,000 years, Jews lived as a small minority among much larger and more powerful civilizations.
There’s much at stake in The First Book. The first-time author wishes to make a good impression and, if things work out, to seduce the reader. The reader, for his or her part, hopes to love the book but looks for signs of weakness. Both parties are blind—there is no track record, no laurels; there is no critical lens. The writer covers up the bumps and bruises. The reader looks for poise and power.
Miguel Syjuco's wildly entertaining "Ilustrado" was the recipient of the 2008 Man Asia Literary Prize. Such awards, as readers know, all too often go to earnest, high-minded, politically correct and rather dull books. In this case, I picture the judges, weary from perusing massive laser-printed works of heart-sinking merit, suddenly rejoicing at the discovery of a manuscript as engaging as this one, absolutely assured in its tone, literary sophistication and satirical humo
If you are looking to discover what singer Van Morrison was like growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, or what gossip former bandmates have about him, don't look for it in When That Rough God Goes Riding. Cultural critic Greil Marcus of Berkeley doesn't write biographies as much as ruminations. His book's subtitle, "Listening to Van Morrison," provides a key to his purpose here: listening to, and pondering, Morrison's music.
"I have been a kind of undercover person from birth almost," says one of the two main characters in Michael Gruber's "The Good Son," "and I am bound to offend those who like neat classifications." Not an improbable statement, coming from a major player in a spy thriller — if "The Good Son" can be accurately described as a spy thriller. It is that, and yet it's a lot more.
For Rupert Murdoch, buying the Wall Street Journal wasn’t just business; it was personal. That’s because with the Journal under his control, Murdoch could finally realize his dream of destroying the New York Times. Murdoch, who started his multibillion-dollar media empire with a couple of Australian papers, has long fought against what he’s pegged as the monolithic media establishment—a self-important, liberal elite, bred in the Ivy League and at top journalism schools on the coasts. And believing that inherited wealth can lead to complacency in business and in the newsroom, Murdoch has always
On the back of the book is printed in large capital letters, "THIS IS A STORY". It's worth remembering that emphatic statement as you read the book. This is not a speculation about the beginnings of Christianity, a claim to have uncovered the real, suppressed history of Jesus. It is a fable through which Philip Pullman reflects on Jesus, on the tensions and contradictions of organised religion – and indeed on the nature of storytelling.
“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” the saying goes, but Brad Watson ignored that advice in his splendidly dream-laden novel, The Heaven of Mercury, and watched it become a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Watson’s dreams work because they avoid twee mysticism or kitsch — they’re made of reality with a slight shift, as if his characters phase just out of the earthly plane, then return with visions that seem logical, essential to our understanding of the story.