A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut, trans. by Helen Scott (1966)& Hitchcock/Truffaut, a documentary film by Kent Jones (2015) Before he began directing, Francois Truffaut was a film critic, and before that, a voracious viewer of films. The director who was a central of French cinema’s New […]
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories, by Charles D’Ambrosio A classic read for #shortstorymonth is Charles D’Ambrosio’s 2006 story collection The Dead Fish Museum, set in the Pacific Northwest landscape, home to the majestic Shasta Cascade mountain range, conifer forests, and crisp air, a place that in these stories informs character. […]
Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward Said Edward Said, the prolific author, political activist, pianist, and music critic, rose to academic stardom in 1978 with the publication of Orientalism, a seminal critique of the appropriations and misrepresentations that founded the Western study of the East. Said, who died in […]
Passage to Ararat, by Michael J. Arlen During the Armenian genocide, 1.2 million Armenians were systematically murdered between 1915 and 1922 by Ottoman Turkish forces, and in Michael J. Arlen’s elegiac memoir, Passage to Ararat, winner of the National Book Award in 1975, Arlen writes to understand his own family’s […]
Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant When the great story writer Mavis Gallant died, I thought of a story from her 2002 collection, Paris Stories, “Mlle. Dias de Corta.” Mademoiselle is the boarder of a financially strapped Parisian widow, a distant yet fascinating immigrant actress who withholds secrets but whose actions […]
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox This classic of literary fiction, written in 1970, is also a classic example of a book that was lost to readers, then found. In 1999, when this novel—and all Paula Fox’s adult novels—fell out of print, interest in the author and her work was almost […]
How to Grow Old Disgracefully: An Autobiography, by Hermione Gingold If you’re a fan of classic films, say, Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 musical, Gigi, or classic stagings of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, you already know Hermione Gingold, the earthy actress with the husky voice and wicked sense of irony. Otherwise, […]
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith This collection of essays came about by accident, Zadie Smith tells us in the foreword, but the voice and curiosity behind it make this read seamless and satisfying. And with Smith, whether the subject is Nabokov or Forster, her person is an […]
Current WTAW Press Titles WTAW Press has two great 2019 titles, Chimerica, the debut novel from Anita Fellicelli, and Like Water and Other Stories, the English-language debut of Olga Zilberbourg. And both are available as Ebooks. In Chimerica, by Anita Felicelli (Love Songs of a Lost Continent), down-on-her-luck Tamil American […]
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer Less, the sixth book and fifth novel by Andrew Sean Greer, is a jewel-box of a novel—compact, sparkling, and filled with treasures. Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Greer’s novel is an effortless read, though that’s not to say that the story—and its […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.