Books & the Arts

Too Many Cigarettes Too Many Cigarettes

Monday: Screening of Garry Marshall's The Other Sister, which seems to be about a goldfish.

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Montale as Couplet Montale as Couplet

The publication of Jonathan Galassi's translation and meticulous annotation of Eugenio Montale's Collected Poems, 1920-1954 has been justifiably celebrated on both sides of the ...

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Michael Mewshaw

Touched by an Angel Touched by an Angel

It's characteristic of Erick Zonca's extraordinary first feature, The Dreamlife of Angels, that we never learn how Isa got that scar across her right eyebrow.

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Soul Survivor of Auschwitz Soul Survivor of Auschwitz

During a wide-ranging conversation I had with Primo Levi in his home in Turin in the summer of 1985, two years before his death, I asked him what effect Auschwitz had on him as a...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Gabriel Motola

Screendance Screendance

I grew up on dance films, although they weren't known as such; they were called musicals.

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Valerie Gladstone

A Partisan’s Review A Partisan’s Review

In A Partisan View, one of the many memoirs in which score-settling refugees from the glory days of the anti-Stalinist, pro-Modernist quarterly bite each other on their kneecap...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Kazan and the Bad Times Kazan and the Bad Times

Dalton Trumbo, a militant blacklisted screenwriter and novelist, commenting on the fifties struggle against government attempts to throttle the American left, said that in that b...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Arthur Miller

Albright’s State Deportment Albright’s State Deportment

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan ...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams

Oscar Who? Oscar Who?

Although the producers of the Academy Awards ceremony like to boast that a billion people watch their broadcast, I take comfort in knowing that another 5 billion do not.

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Spice Grrrl Spice Grrrl

On a trip to Russia in 1995 I was told by the young writers I met there that when a certain famed Soviet novelist returned to his native land, he was an offensive anachronism to th...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Eileen Myles

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