Film
It might seem cheeky of Masterpiece Theatre to newly adapt Boris Pasternak’s monumental novel about the 1917 Russian Revolution so close on the heels of a sumptuous DVD restoration of David Lean’s blockbuster movie. For some, Omar Sharif and ...
Film
No longer a fashionable writer at the time of his death, British playwright Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) has posthumously emerged as a subject of renewed interest. Heralded in the 1930s and 40s as a master of the well-made play, he ...
Books & CDs
First-time mystery novelist D.S. Saunders succeeds like a seasoned pro at grabbing her readers and keeping them guessing until the final pages of The Rule of Two. There are enough genuine surprises and plot twists to satisfy the most ...
Books & CDs
Playfully and at times painfully self-aware, Rick Moody flees from conventional storytelling as if from the West Nile virus or Enron stock. His relentlessly clever stories and novels have always taken the path of greatest resistance. Overripe highbrow prose ...
Books & CDs
Robert W. Norris’s Looking for the Summer is a graceful autobiographical novel that breathes fresh life into a perennial genre: the spiritual bildungsroman. The theme of a questing expatriate who renounces Western materialism in favor of an exotic pilgrimage ...
Film
Last Call is an elegiac dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final days writing The Last Tycoon, the unfinished Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his reputation. Fitzgerald’s spectacular Jazz Age fame and subsequent slide into alcoholism and obscurity are ...
Film
Writer James Agee was 45 years old in 1955 when he died of heart failure in the backseat of a New York taxicab. His unfinished novel, A Death in the Family, was posthumously edited and published to great acclaim two ...
Books & CDs
Don’t be misled by the cover to Mike Magnuson’s disarming memoir about growing up in Wisconsin, Lummox: The Evolution of a Man. The dust jacket photo of Magnuson’s ample gut in a snug shirt and his beefy hand clutching ...
Television
American Collection page on The Ponder Heart It’s been said that Eudora Welty was more comfortable writing short stories than novels. Her publisher nudged her in the direction of longer narratives. Critical consensus has ...
Books & CDs
Jonathan Franzen’s strength as a fiction writer lies in his micromanagement of characterization. It’s no oxymoron to call The Corrections a large-scale intimate portrait of an American family. By burrowing deep inside the bruised middle-class psyches of Alfred and ...
