It looks like Cormac McCarthy is wasting away. Once he was prolix, stuffing big fat novels with long, trailing sequences of curious, chewy words. The prose was rich, the thick paragraphs daunting. He was compared to Faulkner, to Melville. Try reading aloud selected passages from his baroque masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), and you’ll soon find Read More
My report on a literary evening at Makor brought another demurral, on points large and small, from Triangle author Katharine Weber:
I did not say “cramped,” but crammed.My mother being raised in a Protestant identity bubble
by her Protestant mother, despite being a Warburg in
New York City, Read More
May 15, 2006
12:06 p.m.
5 pounds, 11 ounces
New York Presbyterian Hospital
Ten cashmere onesies, please! Jodi Blum, 32, an account executive at Ralph Lauren, didn’t find out the sex of her first baby before birth, but “I thought it was a girl the entire time,” she said, so she made Read More
Jean-Pierre Melville’s magnificent Army of Shadows (1969), from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, is belatedly making its American debut at Film Forum on April 28 under the aegis of Rialto Pictures. It took Melville (1917-1973) 25 years to bring Kessel’s 1943 novel to the screen after he read it in Read More
Jean-Pierre Melville’s magnificent Army of Shadows (1969), from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, is belatedly making its American debut at Film Forum on April 28 under the aegis of Rialto Pictures. It took Melville (1917-1973) 25 years to bring Kessel’s 1943 novel to the screen after he read it in Read More
High above the intersection of Park Avenue and 26th Street, exactly where no one will notice it, a small metal sign silently proclaims the crossroads to be “Herman Melville Square.” So the city pays heed—barely—to the greatest writer ever to live and write here.
Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Read More
High above the intersection of Park Avenue and 26th Street, exactly where no one will notice it, a small metal sign silently proclaims the crossroads to be “Herman Melville Square.” So the city pays heed—barely—to the greatest writer ever to live and write here.
Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick Read More
Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 , by Walter A.
McDougall. HarperCollins, 638 pages, $29.95.
Every chronicle of European settlement of the New World must
include a boat. The boat you choose will shape the story you tell. Start with
the Niña , the Pinta and the Santa Maria , Read More
Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief , from his own screenplay, inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (1955), has been compared favorably with such caper flicks as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Frank Oz’s The Score (2001). By contrast, The Good Thief has been compared unfavorably with such acknowledged caper classics as John Huston’s Read More
Poems of New York , edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $12.50.
Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest Read More
