About 40 minutes into a recent performance of “The Years” in London, Stephanie Schwartz suddenly felt ill and had to put her head between her legs. Onstage at the Harold Pinter Theater, the actress Romola Garai was holding two knitting needles while portraying a young Frenchwoman trying to give herself an abortion. The scene was … Read more
SNOWY DAY AND OTHER STORIES, by Lee Chang-dong; translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang In the first minutes of “Burning,” a 2018 movie by the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, the voice of President Trump rings out from a TV newscast, setting the stage for the ensuing story of a young farmer’s son … Read more
JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney It is a truth universally acknowledged (at least in publishing) that books about books sell well, and, judging by their profusion, that includes those devoted to Jane Austen Inc. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf,” by Rebecca Romney, … Read more
NESTING, by Roisín O’Donnell “Nesting,” Roisín O’Donnell’s gripping debut novel, contains all the twists and turns of a classic thriller; but its heroine, Ciara, isn’t trying to solve a mystery or a murder — she’s a housewife struggling to cut ties with her abusive husband. Ryan is “the type of man who other women sneak … Read more
If the abuse crisis darkens much of this book, it is because the crisis has darkened the church, causing millions to leave. Disputes over homosexuality, priestly celibacy and birth control also appear so often that the reader might think that sex (the word or derivatives appear some 400 times in 514 pages of text) is … Read more
A few years ago, the translator Jeremy Tiang was browsing in a bookstore in Singapore when he came across an unusual book of stories. Written in Chinese under a pen name, the book, “Delicious Hunger,” drew on the author Hai Fan’s 13 years fighting in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand as a guerrilla … Read more
We’re all influenced by how we see the world. Sometimes that view is clear and sometimes it’s a bit fuzzy. Adjusting our “lens” can help us better understand one another, and ourselves. How appropriate to find three recent picture books that look at eyeglasses from different perspectives. Anyone who wears glasses and forgets where they … Read more
Horror is having a moment. Once confined largely to Halloween, or at least to October, “spooky season” has evolved into a monthslong phenomenon — and our hunger for the frightful doesn’t stop there. At a time when real life can feel like a nightmare, a collective turn toward the ghoulish and the ghastly might seem … Read more
We’re all influenced by how we see the world. Sometimes that view is clear and sometimes it’s a bit fuzzy. Adjusting our “lens” can help us better understand one another, and ourselves. How appropriate to find three recent picture books that look at eyeglasses from different perspectives. Anyone who wears glasses and forgets where they … Read more
Barbara Ramos’s black-and-white street photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, are far from the fanfare of the Summer of Love. Instead, the art historian Sally Stein writes in A FEARLESS EYE: The Photography of Barbara Ramos (Chronicle, $35), they make for a … Read more