Regardless of where you live, if you love the art and artifacts of human history, then you’re probably familiar with Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I lived in NYC it was one of my favorite places to go and explore. Where you could sit on a bench for as long as you wanted and look at some of the most amazing art in the world. Or stroll through two of my favorites—the Costume ... Read More...
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
I could not pass up the opportunity to share the love again for a book that I adored. I'm not a big short story reader, but Marra connects the dots so well that The Tsar of Love and Techno reads like an abstract art of a novel. It comes out in paperback tomorrow so if you missed it the first time around, read it now! For art to be the chisel that breaks the ... Read More...
The Tsar of Love and Techno
For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1937 Leningrad with a nameless censor. A man whose artistic skill is such that his sole purpose is to erase people deemed to be enemies of the state from any and all paintings and photographs in which they appear. His talent ... Read More...
A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
When I think of Michael Cunningham many things about his writing come to mind: poetic, compelling… so many adjectives, and yet funny is not among them. Not that he is dark or his writing is without joy, but until I read his newest book, a series of short stories called A Wild Swan, he’d never made me laugh out loud. Now he puts a modern spin on eleven fairy tales and does so in ... Read More...
Of Things Gone Astray
Magical realism is the moving force behind author Janina Matthewson’s, Of Things Gone Astray, an enchanting novel about the everyday realities of life. In it she follows six different people in London who wake up one day to find that something important in their lives has disappeared. For Mrs. Featherby it is the entire front wall of her house, for Robert his job—literally. His ... Read More...
Let Me Be Frank With You
Frank Bascombe is back in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You and I, for one am happy to see him again. Ford’s last novel, The Lay of the Land, covered Bascombe’s travails through his mid-fifties in a way that perfectly encapsulated the middle-age process of fight and accept. In Let Me Be Frank With You, Bascombe moves through four vignettes that are comprised of ... Read More...
