- 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: “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: “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.)...
- David Denby: How summer went digital.
In J. J. Abrams’s “Super 8”—one of the twenty or so digital spectacles, including “X-Men: First Class” and “Green Lantern,” that will storm the malls this summer—a bunch of kids in a small Ohio town, in 1979 . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Books: “No Such Thing as Silence.”
In this concise survey, Gann, a composer and music critic, examines John Cage’s famously noteless composition “4′33″” from origins to afterlife. He lucidly catalogues the “specifically American mix” of influences—Duchamp, Zen, Erik Satie, Thoreau, Robert Rauschenberg—that fed . . ....
- Books: “History of a Suicide.”
In 1990, Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old half sister Kim gassed herself on exhaust fumes in their mother’s garage, and this elegiac book is both a memoir of grief and an investigation into the depressive mind—“the inchoate and terrible power of inner demons . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Imperfectionists.”
This acute début portrays the world of neurotic journalists—“as touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists”—at an English-language paper in Rome. Vignettes introduce us to various characters: a naïve Cairo stringer; an obituary writer unable to . . ....
- Books: “Lit”
This affecting memoir—the third in a series that includes “The Liar’s Club” and “Cherry”—documents Karr’s alcoholism, the breakdown of her marriage, and the unlikely redemption she finds in the Catholic Church. Chased out of Texas by the memories . . ....
- Books: William Boyd’s “Waiting for Sunrise” review.
In 1913, when this novel opens, the improbably named protagonist, Lysander Rief, has one main concern: his psychosexual blockage. The dilettante actor has moved to Vienna to begin—with the help of an analyst there—a wholesale excavation of his past. (At one point, Rief consults Sigmund Freud . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Greater Journey.”
8220;I was not yet twenty. I was quite alone. I did not speak a word of French . . . but I was in Paris and the world was before me.” These recollections of an American art student express the sense of awe and exuberance that fills McCullough’s history . . . (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: “Nothing Daunted.”
In 1916, the author’s grandmother and her best friend, two young Smith graduates from blueblood East Coast families, decided to abandon their cosseted lives of “bridge parties and automobiling” and venture across the country—by train, then wagon—to teach at a remote outpost . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Claude Lanzmann recounts “Shoah” in “The Patagonian Hare.”
When “Shoah” was released, in 1985, it was instantly historic. The nine-and-a-half-hour film about the German death camps in Poland is composed mainly of interviews with Jews who survived them, Germans who helped run them, and Poles who lived alongside them. As most of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Curfew.”
Ball’s fiction lies at some oscillating coördinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread. In previous books, the author—a poet with the mind of a cardsharp—has seemed giddy with his powers of invention, as his . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Ticking Is the Bomb.”
Flynn’s memoir, his second after “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” covers impending fatherhood, his mother’s suicide, revelations of torture, and his father’s alcoholism and dementia. The structure—a few pages on each subject—gives the book a jittery energy . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Dance
goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET
Two new ballerinas step into the role of Princess Aurora in Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty.” Tiler Peck and Kathryn Morgan were both recently promoted—Peck to principal, Morgan to soloist—and they couldn’t be more different: Peck . . ....
- Books: “The Literary Conference.”
Aira, an experimental Argentine writer, has published more than sixty books, though only a few have appeared in English. At a literary conference, César, the protagonist—author and translator by day, mad scientist by night—hatches a plan to rule the world by creating an army . . ....
- 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.)...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Replica” and Daniel Lopatin’s keyboards.
It’s odd to think of experimental music as being a family affair, but for Daniel Lopatin, whose new album, “Replica,” is phenomenal, a large influence has been a synthesizer inherited from his father. Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts, twenty . . . (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: “On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.”
In a provocative book, Margalit—a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton—claims that “rotten compromises are not allowed, even for the sake of peace.” Focussing on the . . ....
- Books: “Gustav Mahler,” by Jens Malte Fischer
In this mammoth biography, Fischer recounts how the conductor and beloved composer—born in Bohemia in 1860, to a family of “brandy distillers and soap boilers”—worked his way up to the dizzying heights of the Vienna Court Opera. As its director, he revolutionized production methods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben McGrath: Daniel Pinkwater on “The Hare and the Pineapple.”
Not long ago, Daniel Pinkwater opened his front door, in the Mid-Hudson Valley, to greet a person who had come to mow his lawn. “Pineapples don’t have sleeves!” the mower blurted out. This was the same week in which Roger Sterling dropped acid, on “ . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “The Debt” and “Gainsbourg.”
The first twenty minutes of “The Debt” are a mess. We flash back and forward in time, flit from one location to the next, and soon arrive at the conclusion that the director, John Madden, must have pressed “Shuffle” rather than “Play.” Gradually, things . . ....
