Category: race
- Who Gets the Oscar?One Battle After Another a film by Paul Thomas Anderson. With Teyanna Taylor, Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benito del Toro. ***** It isn’t just that the plot of One Battle After Another, which is utterly absurd, reflects our own current situation perfectly. It isn’t just that the movie includes one great performance after ...Read more
- Don’t Miss This OneA Gathering of Old Men a novel by Ernest J. Gaines. From Gaines: Four Novels. Library of America. pp. 405-583. ***** Though I almost didn’t read it—I’d been disappointed by In My Father’s House, which I found oddly inert—A Gathering Of Old Men might be Ernest J. Gaines’ best novel. It is certainly the most suspenseful; ...Read more
- Making a ManA Lesson Before Dying a novel by Ernest J. Gaines. From Gaines: Four Novels. Library of America. pp. 585-800. ***** I could make various aesthetic quibbles about A Lesson Before Dying; some minor things drove me crazy as I read, and I wished I could have edited the book (I imagine Gaines suffered from the problem ...Read more
- A Few More Words on FaulknerStories by William Faulkner. Library of America. 1160 pp. ***** I have now, so help me God, read every word William Faulkner wrote and published, at least all the prose. I enthusiastically reviewed this book some weeks ago, and had just a couple of small sections to go. Also, I hadn’t read the first volume in ...Read more
- Two MasterpiecesNickel Boys a film by RaMell Ross. With Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Trey Perkins. Streaming on various platforms. ***** I felt about the movie Nickel Boys exactly the way I felt about the book; I wanted to see it but was half afraid to. There are many ways a movie could have ...Read more
- American OriginalRecollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years by Diane di Prima. Penguin Books. 424 pp. $18.00. **** In this astonishing and inspiring memoir—424 tightly packed pages full of remarkably detailed writing, which covers maybe 30 years of a hugely eventful life—there are several moments that stand out for me. One is when, ...Read more
- And Is He PissedValdez Is Coming a novel by Elmore Leonard. From Elmore Leonard: Westerns. Library of America. pp. 279-414. ***** I shouldn’t make too much of Elmore Leonard. I probably already have. He was a genre writer who didn’t care what genre he was in, switched from Westerns to Crime novels when the Western market fizzled out. He ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.The Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 388 pp. ***** It isn’t often that I read a novel, then sit down immediately and read it again. I wasn’t planning to do that this time. But as I pondered my previous review of The Known World, I saw structural things about the novel ...Read more
- Elmore the GreatLast Stand at Saber River and Hombre from Westerns by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. pp. 1-278. ***** I love the story of Elmore Leonard’s formation as a writer that Greg Sutter tells in his excellent chronology at the back of the Library of America volume. Born in 1925, Leonard grew up in Detroit and attended ...Read more
- Writing Like GodThe Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 388 pp. ***** I have a friend who, when he wants to compliment a writer’s style, says, He (or she) writes like a god. He’s said that a few too many times at this point, but I know what he means. He reads a number ...Read more
- Facing DeathHis Three Daughters a film by Azazel Jacobs. With Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Jovan Adepo, Jay O. Sanders. Streaming on Netflix. ***** His Three Daughters is a sleeper, a Netflix original that we watched because we were fishing around for something to watch on a Saturday night, and it had just been reviewed in ...Read more
- Roll Out the OldstersThelma a film by Josh Margolis. With June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Richard Roundtree. Streaming (for a fee) on Apple+. **** Thelma is an oldster movie, a genre I haven’t written about for some time but which has not gone away. It is a crime movie in which the person going after the ...Read more
- Plain TruthAll Aunt Hagar’s Children stories by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 399 pp. ***** Edward P. Jones, it would seem, can write about anything, and anybody. He published his first book of stories, Lost in the City, in 1992 (otherwise known as half-a-lifetime ago). It was a bit of a late arrival on the literary scene; ...Read more
- He Debuted as a MasterLost in the City stories by Edward P. Jones. Amisted. 243 pp. $15.99. ***** There was a time when I read book reviews the way, as a kid, I used to read the sports pages. At my house we got the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Review, also the New Yorker. It wasn’t as if ...Read more
- Let It RingTelephone a novel by Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 216 pp. **** I had thought of Percival Everett as an offbeat comic novelist who sat down to write a novel with no idea where it was headed (see . I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Even Erasure, though a biting satire, had a comic premise, and the novel ...Read more
- The Other SideWhereas Huck Finn gives us an idyllic vision of life in 19th century America, James gives us the other side, in all its brutality. It’s a necessary and important corrective.Read more
- The River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseTwain, on the other hand, wrote a prose that seemed entirely American and utterly his own. It seemed to roll off his pen.Read more
- Book to MovieDirector Cord Johnson is a huge Percival Everett fan, and American Fiction seems perfectly to capture the spirit of Erasure. I was astounded.Read more
- Slippery SlopeCrook Manifesto a novel by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 319 pp. ***** There is the pleasure of reading a great crime writer, someone like Elmore Leonard at his best, who makes any other storyteller I know look like a rank amateur. There is the somewhat different pleasure of reading a great contemorary novelist, like Jonathan Franzen or ...Read more
- Two Gay MenGood Grief a film by Dan Levy. With Dan Levy, Ruth Nessa, Himesh Patel, Luke Evans. Streaming on Netflix ** Rustin a film by George C. Wolfe. With Colman Domingo, Ami Ameen, Glynn Turman, Chris Rock. Streaming on Netflix ***1/2 Good Grief tells the story of a man whose husband dies. Marc (Dan Levy) is living an ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)