- David Denby: “Black Swan” and “Love and Other Drugs.”
Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is a luridly beautiful farrago—a violent fantasia that mixes the tensions of preparing a new production of “Swan Lake” with sex, blood, and horror-film flourishes. Natalie Portman is Nina, a soloist in a New York ballet company . . ....
- Books: “Luka and the Fire of Life.”
This sequel to “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” is a twenty-first-century myth, with tropes drawn from video games, a multicultural cast of gods and demons, and distinctly postmodern quandaries. Twelve-year-old Luka, a left-handed boy who is “slow to anger and quick . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
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Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Cod,” “Salt,” and “The Big Oyster,” among many other books, discusses his latest release, “World Without Fish,” an illustrated assessment of the future of the oceans. (163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. April 20 at . . ....
- Books: “The Enchanter.”
Zanganeh writes a love letter to literature and to Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who has charmed her with his “demonic artistry of words” and with the “joyousness of pure knowledge.” Zanganeh, once a reluctant reader, picks up “Ada, or Ardor” and quickly discovers that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “James Madison.”
One of only two delegates to attend every session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison transcribed the deliberations. He decided to publish this “most exact account” posthumously, reasoning that “the distance of time like that of space” lends to everything an “attractive” lustre. In . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Reader on Reading.”
Lectures, columns, and other occasional writings are gathered here to form a meditation on “the art of reading.” Thoughtful interrogations of the value of identity labels like “Jewish fiction” or “gay fiction” and the relationship between writers and editors mix with ruminations on the . . ....
- Books: “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.”
Abandoned by his wife and rebuffed by his estranged father, a middle-aged salesman named Maxwell Sim—“like a SIM card”—finds he has “lost all appetite” for “human contact.” Leaving behind seventy Facebook friends and the fake e-mail address he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- Books: “Instead of a Letter.”
Athill, now ninety-two years old, won admiration here for her recent memoirs “Stet” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” but this book, one of two earlier memoirs that have now been reissued, shows that her talent has been evident for decades. Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions . . ....
- Books: “Conscience.”
In 1917, Woodrow Wilson explained the newly minted Selective Service Act as “in no sense a conscription of the unwilling” but “selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.” For pacifists and conscientious objectors, the rhetoric masked an infringement of liberty: how could you be . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Driving Home.”
In 1990, Raban left London “on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons.” He met someone, he tells us, and made for Seattle, the “far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career.” The essays collected here describe, among other things, his attempts to get . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Secret History of Costaguana,”
8220;All Colombians are liars,” the narrator of this turbulent novel declares. He is, of course, Colombian, as is the author, who aims at a corrective to the fictionalized portrait of Colombia in Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo.” Vacillating between polemic and farce, Vásquez presents . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” review.
This lively survey asks “what translation has done in the past and does today,” and “whether it is one thing or many.” In thirty-two wide-ranging chapters, Bellos variously corrects bits of misguided folk wisdom (Eskimo, it turns out, does not have a hundred words . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Colonel Roosevelt.”
8220;He is a great big boy,” Woodrow Wilson said, in 1914, of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had defeated for President. “You can’t resist the man.” Roosevelt had just returned from an Amazon expedition, and his appearance suggested that he might finally be done. He . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Colonel Roosevelt.”
8220;He is a great big boy,” Woodrow Wilson said, in 1914, of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had defeated for President. “You can’t resist the man.” Roosevelt had just returned from an Amazon expedition, and his appearance suggested that he might finally be done. He . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: John Cassavetes’s “Shadows,” at MOMA.
John Cassavetes’s first effort as a director, “Shadows” (screening April 7-8 at MOMA), is the quintessential independent film. The twenty-seven-year-old actor launched it with the 1957 equivalent of a Kickstarter campaign—an appeal to the radio yarn-spinner Jean Shepherd’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: John Cassavetes’s “Shadows,” at MOMA.
John Cassavetes’s first effort as a director, “Shadows” (screening April 7-8 at MOMA), is the quintessential independent film. The twenty-seven-year-old actor launched it with the 1957 equivalent of a Kickstarter campaign—an appeal to the radio yarn-spinner Jean Shepherd’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Inner Life of Empires.”
The eleven Johnstone siblings of Westerhall, in Scotland, were “a large and disorderly family,” whose lives, playing out on three continents between 1723 and 1813, illuminate what Rothschild calls an “empire of intimate exchanges.” The subject is well chosen and provocatively explored. One brother was a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- Books: “Unfamiliar Fishes”
In 1898, as Congress pondered a resolution to annex Hawaii, one representative warned that this would lead to statehood for the multicultural island nation. “How can we endure our shame,” he asked, when a pigtailed Chinese senator, “pagan joss in his hand,” talks pidgin to worthies . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Blood’s a Rover”
The final novel of Ellroy’s “Underworld U.S.A.” trilogy, following “American Tabloid” and “The Cold Six Thousand,” is a fittingly crazed and violent account of the years 1968 to 1972. Alternating chapters follow three henchmen with ties to a labyrinth of interconnected schemes . . ....
- Books: “Jealousy.”
Millet’s previous memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” was a graphic résumé of her history in libertinism, including trysts with, by her own count, at least forty-nine partners. This follow-up is a chronicle of the “irreversible unravelling of my . . ....
