Books
Rushdie Rekindles Old Myths in ‘Fire of Life’
Richard Avedon, one of the greatest American photographers of the last century, once took an unforgettable portrait of Salman Rushdie.
Ozick Mimics James in ‘Foreign Bodies’
Setting it in postwar Paris in 1952, Ozick describes her retelling in relationship to James’s work as “a photographic negative, in which the plot is the same but the meaning is reversed.”
Zapruder's Latest Lacks Ambition
Discourse on contemporary poetry tends to revolve around the question of crisis; not as to whether there is a crisis, ...
McGuane Covers Strange Terrain in ‘Driving’
In Thomas McGuane’s tenth novel, “Driving on the Rim,” a friend of the narrator suggests that he “get some advice about operating on a somewhat different plane. Neither I nor anyone else in town can figure out where the hell you’re coming from.”
Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son Gregory Fried discuss their recently published book "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power In The Age of Terror." They discussed the book yesterday evening in the Barker Center through a game of Twenty Questions with a panel of professors as the questioners.
Poetry and the Police
Robert C. Darnton '60, director of Harvard University Library, gives a talk at the Harvard Book Store about his new book "Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris."
James Franco’s Literary Debut Proves Shallow, Adolescent
Franco’s failure to extract meaning from the chaos he depicts seems not so much a natural reaction to the teenage condition, but rather a trivial consequence of the poverty of his insight.
‘Trespass’ Stays Within Standard Thriller Framework
Although “Trespass” has potential in the themes it undertakes, it fails to go beyond the formulaic, archetypal thriller and only wades in the concepts of envy, corruption, sex, greed, and love without realizing their complex scope.
‘Diary’ Reveals Barthes’ Writing and Grieving Process
On October 26, 1977, the day after his mother died, French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes began the “Mourning Diary”—a series of reflections written on small pieces of paper the size of index cards, that he kept through September 15, 1979.
Poet Schnackenberg Ponders ‘Heavenly Questions’
The “Heavenly Questions” to which Schnackenberg’s title refers are drawn from a set of Chinese poems called “Tianwen,” which ask a series of unanswerable philosophical questions.
New Book Uncovers How French Art Scene Continued Under Nazi Occupation
Former New York Times correspondent, Alan Riding held a lecture yesterday to discuss his new book, “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” which gives a glimpse into the response of French intellectuals under Nazi occupation.