By Matthew Kassel 4/03 11:00am

books

living with shakespeare

On the Page: Shakespeare Edition

Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors

Edited by Susannah Carson

Vintage, 528 pp., $16

It should come as no surprise that the best essays in Living With Shakespeare are by the writers, not the actors and directors listed in its subtitle. Overall, though, this 500-page collection left me unfulfilled: about a quarter of the way in, I found myself craving the real thing. Why am I getting Shakespeare secondhand, I thought, when I can just go straight to the source? Read More

By Staff 2/26/07 12:00am

Hollywood Babel On!

Little Miss Sunshine

If “the little movie that could … and might”5 takes the prize, it will be due to young Abigail Breslin: “they really ought to give it to the little, or not so little, girl”7 who was “the key in it”7. Many might enjoy the moment “when the teen-aged boy finally can’t take Read More

By Mythili Rao 2/12/07 12:00am

A Motley Crew in Hollywood Talks Movies and Makes Love

Elena, a writer of self-help books at work on Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly!, and Max, a Hollywood filmmaker whose single Oscar is decades behind him, are together in bed. They should be having sex, but under the shadow of the recent invasion of Iraq, Max is having a “non-contributing member problem” and prefers Read More

By Daniel Asa Rose 10/17/05 12:00am

Smiley’s Guide to the Novel— A Cure for What Ails You

Chalk up yet another writerly reaction to the trauma of 9/11. Four years on, we’re almost able to chart on a graph how some writers regurgitated bits of the smoke they ingested as super-realistic horror, while others about-faced into fantasy. What Jane Smiley did, as “an antidote to history,” was to take to her bedroom Read More

By Daniel Asa Rose 10/17/05 12:00am

Smiley’s Guide to the Novel- A Cure for What Ails You

Chalk up yet another writerly reaction to the trauma of 9/11. Four years on, we’re almost able to chart on a graph how some writers regurgitated bits of the smoke they ingested as super-realistic horror, while others about-faced into fantasy. What Jane Smiley did, as “an antidote to history,” was to take to her bedroom Read More

By Andrew Sarris 8/18/03 12:00am

Ouch! The Secret Life of Dentists: Weird But Faithful Pros

Alan Rudolph’s The Secret Lives of Dentists , from a screenplay by Craig Lucas, based on Jane Smiley’s novella The Age of Grief , is the most passionate defense of monogamy and marriage from a male perspective that I’ve ever seen in an American movie. Yet too many reviewers have undervalued the film, describing it Read More

By Adam Begley 3/30/98 12:00am

All Dressed Up (in Drag), Smiley’s Novel Goes Nowhere

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton , by Jane Smiley. Knopf, 452 pages, $26.

The Civil War rages everywhere. There’s Cold Mountain and Cloudsplitter , Russell Banks’ huge novel about John Brown, and Jacob’s Ladder , by Donald McCaig, an earnest tome subtitled “A Story of Virginia During the War”–no need to ask Read More