Michael Antman is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing. He is the author of the novel Cherry Whip (ENC Press, 2004), and recently completed a new novel, Everything Solid Has a Shadow. His website, where most of his writing is collected, is at Michael Antman Author.com.
Features
Wednesday, July 22 2009
John Updike: The Final Ornament
Ever the completist, John Updike had managed to finish his life-long project of drawing and connecting the things of his world. A kind of psychic recycler, he never let anything go to waste.
Friday, May 29 2009
The Future is an Empty Room
As digital technology consolidates its conquest of the known universe, emptying our living spaces and assimilating our lives, all that will be left in our future is space. Lots and lots of empty space.
Wednesday, January 28 2009
‘Art’: A Diminished Magnificence
Has any other art, even literature or music, ever exceeded the visual arts in its ambition, its richness, and its sheer beauty?
Tuesday, January 20 2009
Linden Frederick and the Magic of Realism
There is a love in Linden Frederick's paintings – a love for, in the broadest sense, civilization and, in the narrowest sense, for the virtues of merely hanging in there.
Thursday, February 21 2008
A Cooler Head Prevails
A humane and practical corrective to an argument that has grown far too overheated, Cool It is a breath of fresh air that needs to be read by everyone who fears for the future of our world.
Columns
Monday, May 2 2011
88 Highly Debatable Statements About 'Reality' in 'Reality Hunger'
When I review a book, I like to dog-ear pages that contain interesting passages or noteworthy statements. By the time I was done with Reality Hunger, my paperback was so puffed up by pages that were doubled in width from dog-earing that it looked like I'd dropped it into a hot bath filled with Calgon and then left it to dry on a radiator.
Wednesday, February 23 2011
The Librarians and Barbarians of Laura Bush's Memoir
Laura Bush largely avoided the public slanderings that Nancy Reagan endured and that, to a lesser extent, Michelle Obama is now enduring, even though George W. Bush himself was perhaps the most excoriated President in recent American history. The reasons have something to do with Laura Bush's literary sensibility.
Monday, December 13 2010
None Are So Blind As Those Who Will Not See: 'The Mind's Eye' by Oliver Sacks
In this telling of his own encounter with blindness, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks reminds us that there are few human failings worse than taking for granted life and its manifold hidden miracles.
Friday, October 8 2010
'A Cambodian Odyssey': Haing Ngor Was Among the Most Consequential Actors of His Time
It isn't often that a brutal personal account of mass murder, slavery, torture and the obliteration of a sovereign nation causes a reader to meditate on the art of acting, but then, Haing Ngor's was no ordinary life.
Thursday, July 15 2010
'A Tale of Love and Darkness': A Child of Israel and the Children of Palestine
Reading narratives of the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict is like trying to follow the plot of a novel that has had every other page ripped out. Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness has fewer missing pages than most.
Reviews
Friday, November 18 2011
Eurotrash, with a Treasure Inside: 'Steamy Art House Hits'
The best of the four movies in this box set, Torremolinos 73, is so good, so funny and sexy and touching, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it were in the process at this very moment of being ruined by a Hollywood producer intent on a desexualized remake.
Friday, July 22 2011
'Pale Flower': Living for Death
Into this movie's milieu of prison terms, all-night gambling sessions and literal and figurative back-stabbings arrives a dewy young woman named Saeko (pronounced, more or less, 'psycho') who is very young and very tired of life.
Wednesday, February 9 2011
The Real McCoy of Rock: 'Graham Parker & The Figgs Live at the FTC'
Graham Parker & The Figgs Live at the FTC may not be an essential performance, but Parker himself is one of the indispensable performers of the rock era.
Tuesday, November 9 2010
'Party Down: Season Two' -- More Like Party Downbeat, but Funny
Party Down's second season features the various career and personal crises of the crew of struggling actors and screenwriters against the background of a funeral, an unsuccessful orgy, a fundraiser for a private school for the privileged children of vulgar producers, and a hot tub birthday party for Steve Guttenberg.
Friday, August 27 2010
Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II' Is Uneven, But With a Few Bleakly Satisfying Moments
In Human Desire, one of the five films included here, Broderick Crawford is one of those big lugs whose volume control dial has been permanently stuck somewhere between "bluster" and "bellow."
Blogs
Wednesday, December 2 2009
Trouble the Water
Trouble the Water - Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - Zeitgeist Films [$29.99]
