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Arts & Culture Books
September 25, 2006
If Franz Kafka were to rewrite the British television comedy ldquo Yes Prime Minister rdquo the result might resemble Jos Saramago rsquo s new novel Seeing The Nobel Prize-winning novelist weaves wry sardonic humor into his dark parable of an unnamed nation locked down by fear of terrorism
Arts & Culture Books
March 06, 2006
In his new short story collection T C Boyle has gone a step further than William Butler Yeats who conveyed in his poem ldquo The Second Coming rdquo the alienation and disconnectedness of 20th-century life with the memorable image ldquo the falcon cannot hear the falconer rdquo Boyle descr
Arts & Culture Books
January 16, 2006
This year rsquo s hurricanes floods and earthquakes produced such unforgettable apocalyptic scenes of devastation that they may well have altered at least temporarily the imaginative context within which we read Wendell Berry rsquo s new collection of poems many of which celebrate the serene n
Arts & Culture Books
April 25, 2005
In Gilead Marilynne Robinson rsquo s first novel since she published Housekeeping 25 years ago the author offers a profound prayerfully paced narrative containing a wealth of literary consolations To the reviewer rsquo s bromide ldquo Run don rsquo t walk to your nearest bookstore and buy th
Arts & Culture Books
March 21, 2005
When Wendell Berry came to Seattle to read from his new novel Hannah Coulter he was introduced with the words ldquo For those of you who wonder where hope still lies rdquo The audience responded with rapt silence as if to say ldquo Yes we are eager for hope rdquo Berry rsquo s novel d
Arts & Culture Books
February 14, 2005
On his honeymoon Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia read to each other the entirety of Milton rsquo s Paradise Lost an apt symbol for Hawthorne rsquo s persistent preoccupation with issues of sin guilt and redemption To mark the 200th anniversary last summer of Hawthorne rsquo s birth th
Books
October 11, 2004
Nobel Prize-winner Jos Saramago must have been thinking of Franz Kafka rsquo s The Metamorphosis when he wrote this his latest novel In Kafka rsquo s tale Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find he has been transmogrified into an insect something utterly other than what he once was In The Dou
Books
March 29, 2004
The front cover of Gabriel Garc a M rquez rsquo s Living to Tell the Tale shows the author as a wide-eyed child of 2 while the back cover shows the Nobel laureate as a distinguished gentleman of 75 The passage from one stage of life to the other will be the subject of a three-volume memoir and
Books
February 23, 2004
If war is hell a literary corollary might be that every society touched by warfare needs its own version of Virgil or Dante to journey to that hell and return to tell the tale In her collection of short stories Anthonia Kalu plays such a role with respect to the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70 Thi
Books
April 14, 2003
Yann Martel won Britain rsquo s most prestigious literary award the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi a book that reinvents the lost-at-sea novel in quite striking terms Martel himself has been storm-tossed in a controversy about whether he inappropriately employed the premise of a 1981 story by M