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 […]
New Titles From WTAW Press The Groundhog Forever, by Henry Hoke Mark this month’s celebration of pride with the queer sequel to the movie “Groundhog Day.” In Henry Hoke’s debut novel, two film students in post-9/11 Manhattan relive the same day over and over together: the day they meet Bill Murray […]
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Anna May Wong was the first internationally acclaimed Asian American actor, with a career that spanned decades, from 1919 to 1961, and Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early […]
The Love of A Good Woman, Stories by Alice Munro The short story has few practitioners as skilled as Alice Munro, who turns 90 this July, and who’s all but required reading during #ShortStoryMonth. Munro famously began writing stories as a young mother, finding the story took “less time.” (See […]
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 […]
The 400 Blows, by Francois Truffaut 2019 marked the 60th anniversary of the release of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film that changed cinema, and on its debut, brought immediate recognition to the then-unknown director. In May, 1959, The 400 Blows won the Grand Prize for Direction at the […]
New year, new books—and these are some of the ones I’m looking forward to in 2021. My Year Abroad, by Chang-Rae Lee. I’m a fan of Lee’s stylish sentences and restrained voice, and his latest novel is the sprawling tale of a bored American college student, Tiller, and the exuberant […]
The Oysters of Locmariaquer, by Eleanor Clark Late in Eleanor Clark’s extraordinary book, she tells us the oyster needs the same landscape that a plein air painter does: a certain air, light, chemistry. “The explanation,” she writes, “might be quite simple, not esoteric at all—in some common equation of factors […]
The MoneyBunny Series The internationally acclaimed MoneyBunnies Series, by Canadian author and illustrator Cinders McLeod, are the perfect books for young readers on your list, because it’s never too soon to learn financial literacy. Learning how money works, and having the skills to make informed decisions about personal money matters […]
Selected Stories, by William Trevor A volume of stories by William Trevor is a reader’s must-have, and this 2009 collection brings together some of the great writer’s best—48 classic stories, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and literary magazines such as Glimmer Train and 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.