There are novels to understand, but there are novels to experience. After reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday twice—the second time to remind me of the plot—I concluded that it is securely […]
I visited the Lost Young cafe in Paris in 1976. A bunch of us wanted to see a real Parisian nightclub, and our guide agreed to take us. I fear something was lost in translation, […]
I don’t believe I’ve ever read any book that I have more trouble reviewing than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Though it’s classified as a novel, it is unlike any novel I had read before. In […]
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse tells the story about the titular character and his spiritual quest. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, who realizes he wasn’t suited for the traditional path towards […]
Memories of My Melancholy Whores begins with its protagonist and narrator declaring the objectionable goal of wanting to have sex with a teenaged virgin. It’s the gift he wants to give himself for his ninetieth […]
“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery […]
Piercing begins with a chilling scene and intensifies from there. It’s an unrelenting, violent novel that refuses to turn a blind eye to its characters’ deranged compulsions. It’s a novel about compulsions, but not the […]
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and […]
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. […]
In 1968, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris stood as one of the few government-funded and operated tributes to cinema in the world. Henri Langlois, who cofounded the organization in the 1930s, still ran it. During […]
