O.K., here’s my idea: Maybe it’s time for Bob Dylan to shift from writing more songs to writing more books. Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, was brilliant; Modern Times, the new album, a wildly overhyped disappointment. I don’t want him to stop singing and playing, just spend more time writing Chronicles-level prose rather Read More
This is Oskar Eustis’ first season as artistic director of the Public Theater, and of course we all wish him well. The Public is just about the last of our major nonprofit theaters not to sell out to Broadway (though it’s had its shaky moments). Crucially, it’s the only leading nonprofit that seems to be Read More
This is Oskar Eustis’ first season as artistic director of the Public Theater, and of course we all wish him well. The Public is just about the last of our major nonprofit theaters not to sell out to Broadway (though it’s had its shaky moments). Crucially, it’s the only leading nonprofit that seems to be Read More
I’m no soccer nut, but this morning I frantically searched Yahoo news without satisfaction to learn what Marco Materazzi said to Zidane to generate the most important moment in the ’06 World Cup. Then two friends emailed me with the same thing on their minds. Here’s Greg McNair from the Netherlands:
Everybody (meaning me) Read More
was there at the double-super-secret rehearsal. And my reaction was: Do it, Kevin!
I would have kept silent if word hadn’t leaked (in Michael Riedel’s piece in the Post of June 23), about the secret rehearsal of King Lear the previous week, with Kevin Kline playing the mad king.
“[O]ff limits to all but a Read More
was there at the double-super-secret rehearsal. And my reaction was: Do it, Kevin!
I would have kept silent if word hadn’t leaked (in Michael Riedel’s piece in the Post of June 23), about the secret rehearsal of King Lear the previous week, with Kevin Kline playing the mad king.
“[O]ff limits to all but Read More
To borrow a line from Yellow Submarine, in What Good Are the Arts? the English literary critic John Carey disappears up his own existence: His brilliant, provocative, wrongheaded book ends up erasing itself in contradiction.
Mr. Carey, chief critic for London’s Sunday Times, is far too deliberate to be called a bomb thrower. Like his Read More
Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction.
In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri Nabokov, the son, translator and defender of his father’s legacy Read More
Shakespeare’s biographers are mesmerized by the misfit of the scant records of his life and the continuing power of his plays. No biography has found the right join of personality and achievement, and recent ones only add more wrinkles by proposing Shakespeare as a secret Catholic; merely a contributor to the collective authorship of theatrical Read More
If book publishing is a horse race, this fall we’re being treated to a Nobel trifecta. In September, we have Slow Man (Viking), a bag of tricks from the newest laureate, J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940); in October, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Knopf), a typically sonorous title from Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928); and in Read More
