notanotherbookreview

Days at The Morisaki Bookshop,  Satoshi Yagisawa first introduced Tokyo's Jimbocho district, an improbable world of shops specializing in used books. Art books, playscripts, philosophy texts, maps, literature (classic and contemporary) and books bound in the traditional Japanese way are sold in  ancient wood buildings. Inside stores, books are tightly packed from floor-to-ceiling. Outside, carts  in front of the store contain bargains! Like The Strand in NYC, tourists, as well as young people who may not be readers, look at surprising titles and for a couple dollars, or a hundred yen, may give it a try. Browsing books may be a quicker transaction, bur post pandemic, the tactile appeal, mysterious dedication promise adventures for a pittance, no delivery needed.   In  More Days at The Morisaki Bookshop, .Takako, who first came to her Uncle's shop three years before, is now a reader. She glances at the carts of mostly modern novels, and greets her Uncle Sato...

"Wortsman displays a savage descriptive edge, precise and crucial, that is as natural as it is canonically reminescent of the panEuropean urbanism of such writers as Robert Walser and Robert Musil" --Anthony Abbott in  American Bookseller "Wortsman hang(s) with the masters....Dozens of dangling avalanches for people with dreamer's block."--A. Scott  Campbell,  The Boston Phoenix "A fantastic book....Marvelous writing, wonderful craft; and the breath of imagination....(Wortsman) succeeded so well in his craft and art that it reads 'artless' and'spontaneous,' which to me is the highest of compliments.--"Herbert Selby, Jr., author of  L ast Exit to Brooklyn. We have more time to think and seek meanings in our Covid lives. Consider Peter Wortsman's words.  He creates strange universes of human life we think we know, and shows them singular in ways we might never have imagined. Peter Wortsman is the author of novels, books...

Around 1973, I was living in San Francisco when an actor friend called me from a phone booth to ask  if I wanted to have a drink with Tennessee Williams. Alas, I heard the message the next morning, a missed opportunity you don't forget. Mr Williams was in town for rehearsals at A.C.T. of   SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS . My friend said Williams talked about his problem with the director, who was too respectful. Unlike Kazan, who shaped his plays and made them successful, this director was careful about cutting the text. With all due respect, I am of a different opinion. For me, the 50's naturalism extolled by the Actor's Studio (Kazan was a Founder) seems dated in 2018. And the classic  films productions of  plays Williams is known for, The Glass Menagerie,Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, Street Car fo cus less on the hypnotic reverie he creates on the page, the humor laced with pathos, than the laceration of secrets revealed. While those revelations are profound, the met...

https://www.mixcloud.com/WorldRadioParis/your-american-friend-in-paris-episode-14-joseph-harris/   Here is an interview to air in November with Joseph Harriss about JEAN GABIN and his significance  as artist and as a public figure, an "everyman" who came to personify France. J e an Gabin :  The Actor Who Was France The first biography in English of the iconic French film actor whose career and life mirrored both 20 th -century France and the early evolution of modern film. When Joseph Harriss published  T he Tallest Tower : Eiffel and the Belle Epoque, it was acclaimed as a definative book and it was written by an American. Now, the Paris based journalist has done it again with a different kind of icon in  Jean Gabin :  The Actor Who Was France (McFarland) .  Illustrated with more than 40 photographs, the book portrays in graphic detail G abin’s films and personal life, including his unhappy years in Hollywood and his la...

There's been a fashion of  professional theater performed in apartments but until this HAMLET, I hadn't experienced this. A real surprise  how unexpectedly alive and vital this production was in an intimate chair-filled livingroom where actors and spectators were on the same level. This wasn't experimental as much as a classic restored to the bones of what's essentially a family play--dysfunctional to be sure but a moving discovery in this audacious show. The lead (Melissa Nelson) is a young woman, who looked like a Danish boy yet within minutes commanded with a rational self-possession that trumped her torment. Despite the many cries of "Madness!" and her circumlocutions of language, you question that charge. Relentless as any prosecutor, Hamlet investigates her stepfather and mother, accused by her father's ghost. Though you know the stages of her investigation, the process and outcome, this performance, rational and impassioned, is riveting. A...

Regeneration Theatre's new production of Robert Patrick's classic 1974 play, "Kennedy's Children" benefits greatly from the hindsight of 2017, the perceptive direction of Erin Soler and the curatorial insight of producer Barnaby Edwards. In his note about the new production, Edwards writes that on November 9th, 2016, "I woke up that morning knowing that a play I had been thinking about for some time needed, urgently to be seen again." He had it right. This play is incredibly relevant for 2017. In the late 1970's when I landed in New York, I was a playwright produced elsewhere and eager to see new work. I submitted to workshops, went to readings and local shows. I saw "Kennedy's Children" in an early production and remember feeling annoyed by histrionic pathos, slow pacing and what seemed steriotyped characters. A few years junior to the characters, I had lived through some of the same experiences. To be fair to the playwright, I...

While greatly enjoying THE GOLDFINCH, I noticed more than a nod to Great Expectations. Tartt doesn't merely reinvent the familiar tropes of the classic but takes them in directions significant for our time. Like the painted goldfinch, the trompe l'oeil masterpiece of the story, this novel is both referential and its own entity. The fluff on the bird in the painting looks soft as real down but close-up is just brush strokes. Part of my pleasure in this novel was to be caught up in it, while noticing Tartt's sleight of hand. Both THE GOLDFINCH and GREAT EXPECTATIONS are narrated by young heroes trying to make sense of strange destinies in journals they assume no one will read. Both are resigned to diminished expectation, when fate takes a sudden turn. The orphaned Pip, though exposed to wealth, literature and culture, through the stagy Ms. Havisham, had resigned himself to an apprenticeship at the blacksmith's bench, when a mysterious benefactor gives him the moneyed l...

Harper Lee's classic novel, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, revealed the underbelly of racism through a young girl's narrative of injustice and hypocrisy in a small southern town. Something similar happens in Angela Pneuman's new novel, LAY IT ON MY HEART, (July, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), where Charmaine Peakes, a 13-year old raised in an extreme evangelical Kentucky town, struggles to reconcile her family's belief and the town's moral purpose with the downward spiral of their lives. Amazingly, this novel manages to be funny about the serious stuff. That she is the granddaughter of the iconic prophet of East Windsor, whose "great awakening" attracted people to found the town, gives Charmaine a special status. But more important to her is the fact of her father's prophetic gift. He's revered by the town as a man close to God, whose writings are inspired. Charmaine wishes he had more time for her, though she accepts that he's "different" an...

In Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the orphaned Pip has reconciled himself to a life at the forge, when he suddenly learns he has a fortune and is to become a gentleman. In LITTLE FAILURE, Gary Shteynart's memoir, Igor leaves his semi-invalid childhood in the Soviet Union and suddenly becomes Gary, a healthy school boy in the U.S.A. Two sisters, Marne and Nelly, hide their parents' bodies and suddenly are on their own, scrambling for survival in Glasgow, Scotland in DEATH OF BEES. These are first-person narratives by bewildered children struggling to emotionally process the past, while trying to succeed in an unfathomable present. Bridging that gap is crucial. And when they fail, they fall into chasms of self-destruction. Pip dissipates his potential on a dandy's wardrobe, fine liquors, and elaborate suppers with actresses. Igor, who becomes Gary, since Igor is to Americans the name of a hunchback, finds himself a middle school pariah ridiculed as the Red Gerbil. But wh...

In James McBride's THE GREAT GOD BIRD, which won the 2013 National Book Award, Henry is a slave boy doing errands in his father's barbership, owned by their hard working master. It's 1857, a contentious time in the West between Slavers and Free Staters. Henry's adventures begin, when the Abolitionist John Brown rises up from his father's barber chair with a rifle. His target isn't Henry's father but his master. But, as happens with the best of intentions, Henry's father dies, collateral damage. Brown has freed Henry, which means he gets to join the freedom fighters, a ragtag "army" who live on the land. It's chance that Brown mistakes Henry for a girl, and gives him a dress. It's just odd that he hands him a linty old onion. When Henry eats the disgusting thing, figuring he's supposed to, he has no idea he's eaten Brown's good luck charm. Known as the "onion" after that, he becomes its replacement. Once in a d...

I am reading classics for free on my KOBO and buying hardcovers of new fiction. I am liking the classics better. In terms of slightly guilty pleasure, I'm reading classics I've seen on PBC or BBC. NY in 2012 is sending me back to more genteel times? I feel a little like Clooney in The Descendants, who's shocked when his kids open their mouths and vile street invective comes out. Made me laugh but not sure I like living here. So, when Margaret Hale is partying with her cousin on Harley Street, I may know the dances and dinners and the made to perfection clothes--fab fabrics--and the admiration of handsome men is superficial hooey. She certainly has an inkling of this, and, though a great beauty, is skeptical of her lovely cousin's superficiality, but heck--it's so much fun to be a girl with money and prospects! Then her cuz marries an aristo with a military career and leaves for Corfu. Margaret returns home to the genteel poverty of her father's parsonage in th...