Category: creative-process

Beckett in the Bardo
The Unnamable from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. The mystery of Samuel Beckett continues, at least for me. Some months back, when I had finally tackled his Three Novels—which had been sitting on my shelves for years—I finished the first two, but admitted publicly, in this space, that I gave up ...
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Stories Short and Long
Autumn by Ali Smith. Pantheon. 264 pp. $24.95 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley. Washington Square Press. 208 pp. $14.00 There are short stories that seem to have enough material for novels. Alice Munro’s late work was like that, any number of mid-length stories, forty or fifty pages, which encompassed an entire life. Frank O’Connor said ...
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Distinctly Praise the Years
Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany. Wesleyan/New England. 212 pp. Every now and then I reread something by Samuel R. Delany because all of his work is intelligent, beautifully written, and unfailingly deep. The fact that I’ve read it before doesn’t in the least diminish it. I love spending time in the presence of such ...
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This Movie Is About You (Put Away Your Phone)
Paterson A film by Jim Jarmusch. With Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Nellie. Every now and then people call something a Zen movie, and the candidate this year is Paterson, a film whose script Jim Jarmusch apparently wrote twenty years ago and in which almost nothing happens. A man (Adam Driver) awakens every morning ...
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You Gotta Start Somewhere
Beginners a film by Mike Mills. With Ewen McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Mary Page Keller, Cosmo. I have the perfect solution for those who loved 20th Century Women and don’t know what to watch next (after they’ve read the profile of director Mike Mills in the New Yorker): watch Mills’ previous film Beginners, which streams ...
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All Stories Are Made Up
Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Harper. 430 pp. $28.00 Voss by Patrick White. Penguin. $18.00 The great Pittsburgh writer John Edgar Wideman—whom I wrote about in a recent post—once published a book entitled All Stories Are True. I thought it a brilliant and fascinating title, but it could just as easily have been All Stories Are False. Even ...
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The Poetry of Everyday Speech
Fences a film by Denzel Washington. Screenplay by August Wilson. With Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo. When I was a young man growing up in Pittsburgh, I wanted to be the writer who put the city on the map. I read Theodore Dreiser’s Newspaper Days; he’d spent some time in the city, and ...
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A Star is Torn
La La Land a film by Damien Chazelle. With Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt. ***** I’ve said so many times that a movie is not this that I want to be clear when one is: this is the feel-good movie of the year, 2016, 2017, whatever year you got. From the moment it opens with ...
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Black Boys Looking Blue
South to a Very Old Place, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, From the Briarpatch File from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1049 pp. $45.00. Moonlight, a film by Barry Jenkins, with Mahershala Ali, Duan Sanderson, Naomie Harris. ***** I haven’t finished the last few pieces from Collected Essays ...
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Gusto and a Sense of Elegance
The Omni-Americans from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1048 pp. $45.00 The Omni -Americans was at least partly prompted by the Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) from 1965, and author Albert Murray states his central thesis in the introduction, “Someone must at least begin to try ...
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Maggie’s Farm
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. 293 pp. $16.00 I’ve been fascinated by the reactions to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, which was announced as I was heading to Pittsburgh for my 50th high school reunion. A number of Baby Boomers seemed to regard it as a validation of their whole lives, as if ...
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Not Little Enough
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Anchor Books. 816 pp. $17.00. I began this book with great enthusiasm and sped through the first two hundred pages. Hanya Yanagihara is a wonderfully skilled novelist and pulled me right into the story. But by the last two hundred I was seriously tired of the book, almost dreaded reading. ...
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Who Are Your People?
The Sympathizer a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press. 385 pp. $16.00 This novel won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a remarkable work of art—I’m stunned at the way this younger novelist projects himself back into this tumultuous time—but I’m more interested in it as a human document than as a ...
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Where the Boys Are
Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, the Restored Original Text by Guy Davenport. The Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. $525.00 Once before on this website I reviewed a book that I was sure none of my readers would ever see, an obscure Buddhist text that had been out of print forever and that I was quite ...
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Train to Nowhere
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 306 pp. $26.95 This is one of the most wrenching and difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a work of art, and its sheer artistry gives pleasure. At the same time, I didn’t look forward to reading it every night. People will say the subject is slavery, or racism, but ...
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Get Your Buns Over Here
Sausage Party, a film by Gret Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. With Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. *** What a cast, right? Five Oscar nominees in one movie. Unfortunately, it’s an animated film about food products in the supermarket. The voices are great. But the cast doesn’t show its stuff. Apparently this ...
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Becoming the True Self
The Blake Project: Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 332 pp. In my last post in the Blake project, I spoke of a book that my wife was reading but that I had avoided because I wanted to explore my own reading of Blake’s work. That strategy worked ...
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Mommy and I Are So Damn Brilliant
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. New Directions. 484 pp. $18.95 I can’t remember when I’ve had such mixed feelings about a novel. There is an assumption behind this book that people with higher IQ’s, or people who have more knowledge, are superior individuals, who don’t have to deal with the rest of us. There is ...
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In a Pickle
Maggie’s Plan a film by Rebecca Miller. With Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore. **** The first thing to be said about Maggie’s Plan is that it is a comedy. I don’t care what Rebecca Miller has done in the past and I don’t care how serious the conversation seems at the beginning of the movie. ...
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All Religions Are One
The Blake Project: All Religions Are One; There Is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell I first studied William Blake in my survey of English literature course at Duke University. To say that I was excited would be a vast understatement: I had a ...
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