Filmmaker and Critic Virginie Despentes Is Still, Unfortunately, Quite Necessary
Virginie Despentes’ feminist arguments in her recently rebooted collection of essays, King Kong Theory, remain fresh and frustratingly relevant.
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Silence Has a Sound: The Unempty Quiet in ‘Sound of Metal’
If punk is for those who reject mainstream culture, then in the music film Sound of Metal, nothing is more punk than radical deaf acceptance.
Truths Overlap in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Memoir of German Reunification, ‘Not a Novel’
Living under the repressive East German regime taught its citizens to distrust their government and read through the lines of its proclamations to glean the reality of a situation, Jenny Erpenbeck explains in Not a Novel.
Pretend It’s a City Proves Once Again, You Can’t Argue with Fran Lebowitz
Fran Lebowitz's ubiquitous little smirk is still going as strong as it ever did because—and this is why she is sexier now than she was 50 years ago—there is really just no way whatsoever to make her feel bad about herself.
Alvarez’s ‘In The Time of the Butterflies’ Returns with Undiminished Intensity
The lure of beautiful beaches might make the Dominican Republic among the most popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean, but the ghosts of its troubled history, as captured in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, stalk the living.
Box Brown Takes on the Ultimate Weed Killer in ‘Cannabis’
As cannabis legalization spreads, Box Brown's graphic novel, Cannabis, examines the sordid and racist history of how it became demonized in the first place.
Scorsese and Dylan: A Match Made in Fantasy
In Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, a cinematic genius and a Nobel Prize-winning musical icon pair for a magical and purposefully deceptive look at rock 'n' roll life in the mid-'70s.
‘How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents’ Holds Particular Relevance in These Times
Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is more relevant in America in 2019 than Alvarez might have imagined her debut novel would be in 1991.
’Good Enough’ Is Great on Darwin
In Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society, philosopher Daniel S. Milo argues that science and society have overemphasized Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
Seth’s ‘Clyde Fans’ and the Revolving Slowdown of a Declining Business
Seth's inspiration for the epic story, Clyde Fans, grew from an empty storefront and photographs of two middle-aged men; thus it is imbued with palpable sadness and regret.
Will Hope Rise from the Dead in Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘My Life As a Rat?
If happiness usually proves duplicitous, and melancholy a dependable constant, then the journey of an epic Joyce Carol Oates novel is always going to be a trip worth experiencing, as with My Life As a Rat.