- John Lahr: “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure”
8220;The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” one of the courtiers in “All’s Well That Ends Well” says in a piece of throwaway brilliance that reveals Shakespeare’s argument and his theatrical game. The ever-changing . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Point Omega.”
This thin novel begins and ends with a brilliant analysis of an art installation consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” slowed down so that it lasts twenty-four hours. DeLillo seems to be instructing the reader: “The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also . . ....
- Books: “Townie.”
This charged memoir by the author of “House of Sand and Fog” begins as his parents’ marriage unravels, and his father, an acclaimed writer, leaves his mother struggling to support four kids. Living in poor towns in northern Massachusetts, Dubus and his siblings “roamed the neighborhoods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Kevin Barry’s “City of Bohane” review.
Barry’s first novel is a grizzled piece of futuristic Irish noir with strong ties to the classic gang epics of yore. Logan Hartnett, a.k.a. Long Fella, a.k.a. Albino, runs the Hartnett Fancy gang, which has varying degrees of control over a city’s sprawling slums. His rival . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Wooden Hat”
In this understated novel, Gardam returns to the successful barrister and judge Sir Edward Feathers, the protagonist of her deliciously acerbic “Old Filth.” The complementary tale, told largely from the point of view of Feathers’s wife, Betty, a fellow-“Raj orphan,” begins as the . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- 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: “Electric Eden.”
This sprawling, mesmerizing exploration of “Britain’s visionary music” examines the idiosyncratic folk-influenced musicians of the late sixties and early seventies. Young begins with Vashti Bunyan, who wrote plaintive songs while travelling across industrial England by horse and cart, and focusses on performers who drew on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Chill”
8220;The chill of suspicion and incomprehension came between me and humankind when I was sixteen,” Bilenchi’s spare, dark bildungsroman begins. Following an unnamed teen-ager’s initiation into adulthood in Tuscany in the Fascist years, it is a series of episodes of alienation, narrated in . . ....
- Books: “We Had It So Good.”
When Grant’s fifth novel begins, Stephen Newman is a pampered child in postwar California. As it ends, he is a widower in contemporary London mourning his British wife. The intervening pages trace the course of the couple’s life—and the lives of their family and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Greenberg” and “Vincere.”
Many of us have known someone like Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), the prickly failure who is the hero of Noah Baumbach’s new movie, “Greenberg.” And many of us, with a sigh, have pulled away from him—not when he was young, perhaps, but certainly by . . ....
- 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: “Walks with Men.”
Beattie’s novella is set in the Manhattan of literary aspirants’ dreams: a recent Harvard graduate, Jane, takes up with Neil, a man twenty-three years her senior, who provides an education in food, clothing, and sex. “You’re smart,” he says, “but you . . ....
- 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.)...
- Nancy Franklin: “The Pacific” on HBO.
8220;The Pacific,” a ten-part miniseries that begins Sunday on HBO, is a companion piece to the channel’s “Band of Brothers,” which chronicled a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division from training to D Day, and on to Germany, through Holland and . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Dance
goatTitle-->CHARLES ATLAS / “JOINTS ARRAY”
In many ways, 2011 has turned out to be the “Year of Merce,” with tributes, exhibits, discussions, and performances galore, all leading up to the dissolution of Cunningham’s company at the end of the year. As part of . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Dance
goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET
As the “Nutcracker” season winds down, the repertory season begins. Leading into a week of Balanchine’s glorious “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the first of several full-evening story ballets, the company presents a program called “Tradition and . . ....
- 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: “The Last Stand.”
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer looked down through binoculars at an immense Indian village on the Little Bighorn River. All he saw were women and children; the men seemed to be away. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!” he shouted. “We’ll . . ....
- Books: Richard Mason’s “History of a Pleasure Seeker” review.
The hero of this artful evocation of the European Belle Époque, Piet Barol, is handsome, witty, charming, and poor. Eager to correct his only defect, he takes a post tutoring the troubled son of a rich Amsterdam hotelier. Soon he begins a love affair with his charge’s . . . (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.)...
- Books: “The War Lovers.”
Before embarking for Cuba, in 1898, the Rough Riders, led by Theodore Roosevelt, chanted, “Rough, tough, we’re the stuff / We want to fight and we can’t get enough / Whoopee!” In Thomas’s telling, that spirit—manliness so loudly asserted that it’ . . ....
- David Denby: “John Carter,” “The Deep Blue Sea” reviews.
The season of quarter-billion-dollar movies has kicked off with a mess. Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Curfewed Night.”
Peer’s memoir of Kashmir chronicles a “fairy-tale childhood of the eighties”—samovars of kahwa tea drunk in paddy fields beneath the Himalayas—that gives way to “the horror of the nineties”: India’s rigging of the 1987 state elections and . . ....
- David Denby: “Hereafter” and “Inside Job.”
Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” begins with a magnificent re-creation of the 2004 tsunami as it hits an unnamed resort town in Southeast Asia. An initially receding ocean returns as a thick, unstoppable wave that surges ashore and rushes down a street, washing away buildings, tossing cars . . ....
