Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, by Bob Balaban With the Pentagon’s recent release of three unclassified videos of UFO’s taken by navy pilots, it’s understandable you might be watching the skies. And if you’ve yet to see Steven Spielberg’s classic of extraterrestrial contact, Close Encounters of the Third […]
WTAW Press 2019 Titles WTAW Press released two great titles in 2019, Chimerica, the debut novel from Anita Fellicelli, and Like Water and Other Stories, the English-language debut of Olga Zilberbourg, Both titles are available as ebooks, here. In Chimerica, by Anita Felicelli, down-on-her-luck Tamil American trial lawyer Maya Ramesh […]
Little Failure: A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart “In order for me to be born,” Gary Shteyngart says early on in his memoir, “all four branches of my family have to end up in Leningrad, trading in their tiny towns and villages for that somber, canal-laced cityscape. Here’s how it happens.” […]
The Clothing of Books, by Jhumpa Lahiri “How do you clothe a book?” is the how this small, but powerful volume begins. For a writer whose stories are as personal and complex as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, a cover’s design presents a different set of questions. The Clothing of Books began as […]
As you read this you may, like me, be working from home, while your partner is doing the same, and your child, or children, are at home too. Suddenly, this is the way things are, or at least should be, to #flattenthecurve of a very frightening virus. What happens when […]
The Marriage Plot, by Jeffery Eugenides “Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.” That ironic reflection comes early in Jeffrey Eugenides’ lively 2011 novel. The observation is made by Madeleine Hanna, one of three central characters, all of whom are students at Brown University. We meet them on the […]
The Vexations: a novel, by Caitlin Horrocks The lives of artists must portray artmaking for what it is: work—anything else is a romanticized view—and Caitlin Horrock’s debut novel, The Vexations, occupies just that; it’s an intricate portrayal of the life of modernist composer Erik Satie—and his artmaking—that mines his most […]
There There: A novel, by Tommy Orange Brilliant, innovative, lyric. Tommy Orange’s stunning fiction debut is all those things, but trying to describe this eclectic, very personal, and contemporary novel in adjectives doesn’t do it justice. Called “groundbreaking, extraordinary” by The New York Times, and garnering praise from People Magazine […]
The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, by Emma Thompson Emma Thompson’s diary tracks the making of the award-winning Sense and Sensibility with Thompson’s trademark dry wit and in fascinating detail. The 1995 film, directed by Ang Lee, garnered seven Oscar nominations, with Thompson winning the Award for Best Adapted […]
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Don’t be misled by the tabloid nature of the title. Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early cinema’s most notable icons. You could be forgiven for not knowing the […]
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.