It looks like Cormac McCarthy is wasting away. Once he was prolix, stuffing big fat novels with long, trailing sequences of curious, chewy words. The prose was rich, the thick paragraphs daunting. He was compared to Faulkner, to Melville. Try reading aloud selected passages from his baroque masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), and you’ll soon find Read More
My report on a literary evening at Makor brought another demurral, on points large and small, from Triangle author Katharine Weber: I did not say "cramped," but crammed. My mother being raised in a Protestant identity bubble by her Protestant mother, despite being a Warburg in New York City, does signify and Read More
May 15, 2006 12:06 p.m. 5 pounds, 11 ounces New York Presbyterian Hospital Ten cashmere onesies, please! Jodi Blum, 32, an account executive at Ralph Lauren, didn’t find out the sex of her first baby before birth, but “I thought it was a girl the entire time,” she said, so she made sure to stock Read More
May 15, 2006
12:06 p.m. 5 pounds, 11 ounces New York Presbyterian Hospital Ten cashmere onesies, please! Jodi Blum, 32, an account executive at Ralph Lauren, didn’t find out the sex of her first baby before birth, but “I thought it was a girl the entire time,” she said, so she made sure to stock up Read More
Jean-Pierre Melville’s magnificent Army of Shadows (1969), from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, is belatedly making its American debut at Film Forum on April 28 under the aegis of Rialto Pictures. It took Melville (1917-1973) 25 years to bring Kessel’s 1943 novel to the screen after he read it in Read More
Jean-Pierre Melville’s magnificent Army of Shadows (1969), from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, is belatedly making its American debut at Film Forum on April 28 under the aegis of Rialto Pictures. It took Melville (1917-1973) 25 years to bring Kessel’s 1943 novel to the screen after he read it in Read More
High above the intersection of Park Avenue and 26th Street, exactly where no one will notice it, a small metal sign silently proclaims the crossroads to be “Herman Melville Square.” So the city pays heed—barely—to the greatest writer ever to live and write here. Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick has Read More
High above the intersection of Park Avenue and 26th Street, exactly where no one will notice it, a small metal sign silently proclaims the crossroads to be “Herman Melville Square.” So the city pays heed—barely—to the greatest writer ever to live and write here.
Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick Read MoreFreedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 , by Walter A.
McDougall. HarperCollins, 638 pages, $29.95. Every chronicle of European settlement of the New World must include a boat. The boat you choose will shape the story you tell. Start with the Niña , the Pinta and the Santa Maria , and you Read MoreNeil Jordan's The Good Thief , from his own screenplay, inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur (1955), has been compared favorably with such caper flicks as Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001) and Frank Oz's The Score (2001). By contrast, The Good Thief has been compared unfavorably with such acknowledged caper classics as John Huston's Read More
Poems of New York , edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. Everyman's Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $12.50.
Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest wealth Read MoreAt 29, Herman Melville had a wonderful wish, that Shakespeare was alive in New York.
"Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over … punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might Read MoreA few months back, in the South Pacific, I met a lady named Olive from the Save the Whales movement. She was on her way to an international conference and staying at the same hotel as a friend in Nuku'alofa. We all went out to eat. She reminded me of a suffragette: striking, thin-lipped, precise Read More
Contrarian that I am, I like Hollywood movies about Hollywood. I tend to give the genre the benefit of the doubt, despite the traditional box-office resistance to movies about movie people, because what else do filmmakers know as well? Besides, some of the best movies have taken this Pirandellian posture, most notably Billy Wilder's Sunset Read More
James Gray's The Yards , from a screenplay by Mr. Gray and Matt Reeves, continues on the soulful, downbeat path across the outer boroughs that the then 24-year-old Mr. Gray marked back in 1994 with his first film, Little Odessa . In that one, his locale was Brooklyn's Brighton Beach with its largely Russian population. Read More
