Review Mondays: February Preview
Every Monday, Tate Street High Society & Co-Op publishes Three-Sentence Reviews of our favorite books. Check out the books we'll be reviewing in February! [...]
Review
Sophocles’ Antigone, Modernized
Seamus Heaney brings his skill of translation to the ancient Greek tragedy, “Antigone,” first written by dramatist Sophocles in the 4th century BC. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 79 pages. While Heaney’s “The Burial at Thebes” play translation was published in 2004, the [...]
Suddenly, A Review (Suddenly, A Knock on the Door: Stories by Etgar Keret)
On the surface, Etgar Keret’s stories aren’t so much stories as they are fabular anecdotes that unfold with the concision and wit of a fatally funny joke (many of the stories in his newest collection come in under two pages, many of them are as funny as they are bleak). What’s [...]
No Common Reader (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman)
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998) collects eighteen essays by Anne Fadiman about her lifelong love of all things book-related. Whether describing her childhood fascination with sesquipedalians (“long words,” as she explains), or the post-nuptial stress [...]
War Graphics (Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi)
In Marjane Satrapi’s 2004 memoir, Persepolis:The Story of a Childhood, we read about the life of a young, passionate girl with revolutionary parents during the return to Islamic fundamentalism and then war with Iraq in Teheran, Iran. While stark reports and evening news pundits tend to be [...]
Plagiarisms, etc. (The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem)
Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. These nearly microscopic men in hats and coats scurry among an archipelago of desolate street [...]
What if Shakespeare Grew Up in Iowa?
In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s production, the Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, our favorite farcical Falstaff is a recently-failed presidential candidate who finds himself down and out in Windsor, where the wives are plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that a few of them are married [...]
On Truthiness and Beauty* (The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal)
How far are essayists allowed to bend the truth before they’re no longer writing nonfiction? In The Lifespan of a Fact (Norton) writer John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal go toe-to-toe over the veracity of D’Agata’s 2003 essay about a Las Vegas teen’s suicide and come [...]
They Is
If you haven’t gotten a chance to read Tobias Wolff’s short story, “Bullet in the Brain” — you’re missing out. Not only is it a wonderful study on structure, time, and character, but the exceptional quality of language makes the piece stunning. We encourage our [...]
Brief, Funny, a Little Bit Frightening (The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders)
George Saunders’ surrealist novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead) is a startling, funny satire about a border dispute between the imaginary countries of Inner and Outer Horner and the meteoric rise of the demagogue Phil, a petulant, Machiavellian crumbum who seems peculiarly [...]
