Please note: I was trying out different themes for the site and a few recent comments got deleted. My apologies for this mistake.
We’ve had Shout! Factory TV as a mainstay on our TV for a while but a current listing almost escaped my notice, so I wanted to pass it on to anyone else interested. Currently there are a few episodes from the Fridays TV series from their first season on ABC in 1980. I completely missed […]
In looking up something this morning I ran across the September 9, 1979 New York Times article Anthony Hopkins: ‘Acting Is Like Being in a Public Confessional’, which had been behind a paywall when I was watching and researching the actor starring in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Kean. I had posted a ‘bleg’ for a copy […]
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Edited by Laura Furman (Anchor) The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from […]
I was happy to get the perfect birthday gift this year—Vladislav Vančura’s The End of the Old Times (Konec starých časů). I have been looking for a copy to call my own since I read the book about 4½ years ago. My comments on the book are here. It’s a wonderful novel, enjoyable at both […]
The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill Alfred A. Knopf, 2017 Hardcover, 352 pages The city had a rich, complex life long before you ever came along and started having your own personal little responses to it, Griffin. It’s bigger than you. … The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a […]
Illustration by Ragni Svensson From Platonov’s Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space by Natalia Poltavtseva The May 2018 edition of e-flux contains the Andrei Platonov story “Immortality,” translated by Lisa Hayden and Robert Chandler. It is a fairly simple but moving story of the railway station chief Emmanuil Semyonovich Levin tirelessly working to keep trains running on […]
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: 1970 A few months ago I watched one of my favorite movies, Being There (1979), and realized I had never read Kosinski’s novel on which he based his screenplay. If you’re unfamiliar with the storyline, Chance is a simple-minded man living at the townhouse of a […]
To Know a Fly by Vincent G. Dethier Foreword by N. Tinbergen Illustrated by Bill Clark and Vincent Dethier Oakland, California: Holden-Day, Inc., 1962 Although small children have taboos against stepping on ants because such actions are said to bring on rain, there has never seemed to be a taboo against pulling off the legs […]
Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn TempestYale University Press, 2017 To a considerable extent this book will examine how Brutus’ life has been recorded and transmitted from antiquity to today: a central contention is that, to appreciate Brutus the man, we must really probe the sources we use, to understand who is speaking and shy. […]
On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger Translated from the German by Stuart Hood New Directions, 1947 Original publication in German in 1939 From The American Scholar, July 20, 2015: In 1970, the Scholar’s editors polled the literary lights of the day for their opinion on that book published in the past quarter of a […]
Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Ancient Athens by David StuttardHarvard University Press: April 2018Hardcover, 400 pages From the inside book flap: Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled […]
Carpenter’s Gothic by William Gaddis Narrated by Nick Sullivan Published by Tantor Audio Running time 9 hrs 34 minsA few years back I posted a brief note on Nick Sullivan’s narration of two of William Gaddis’ novels. Mr. Sullivan was kind enough to email me that his narration of Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic had just been […]
On Grand Strategy by John Lewis GaddisNew York: Penguin Press, 2018 John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military & Naval History at Yale University. He is best known as an author specializing in the Cold War and grand strategy (six of the ten books shown at his faculty page have “Cold […]
I finally got to see this version of Hamlet, the 2015 filming of National Theatre Live‘s production starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. I had intended to see it twice before, but I had been unable to attend either time (even after buying tickets to one of them). I had a strong sense of […]
A few years ago, the boys and I read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, a historical fiction book that looks at the “disappearance” of the Roman Ninth Legion (Legio IX Hispana) from Britain in the second century AD. While we enjoyed the book (and the 2011 movie version, The Eagle), we also looked […]
I received word that David Womack, a true mentor and influence on my life, passed away on July 11, 2018. For someone that had such a huge, giving heart, it’s a sad irony that it was that physical organ that failed him. For a few semesters when I was in college, I lived at his […]
“[G]reat power involves great responsibility.” Sounds like something from Spiderman, but it’s part of a line from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s undelivered Jefferson Day Speech. Coincidentally, Jefferson Day was officially recognized by FDR beginning in 1938. Anyway…the speech can be found at The American Presidency Project. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia the day before this […]
I wanted to pass on a few of the books and movies the boys and I read and watched this semester for school (6th and 8th grades). My goal was to tie in reading with our U.S. history class as much as I could. This isn’t all we covered, but a few of these were […]
I’m happy to report my wife’s book has been translated into Polish! Which is funny since she gives me grief about the books I read from Central European authors. I’ve proposed a book tour of Poland, but I doubt our budget can handle it at the moment. You can dream, right? Since I’m talking about […]
Contra Mundum Press has made available some excerpts from the forthcoming book Black Renaissance by Miklós Szentkuthy, the second volume in his St. Orpheus Breviary series. The samples can be found at this link. Needless to say, I’m excited and looking forward to the release. The sample contains the beginning of the introductory essay by […]