There are a lot of challenges in reading 17th-century literature; add to Paradise Regained a basic question as to what exactly is being read. Is this a stand-alone pocket epic or intended follow-up to another epic?
Yes to both is the best answer I can offer. Whether you read it for the history, the religion, or the craft itself, John Milton serves up a challenging, engaging, if unfulfilling treatment of New Testament themes, modelled on how he did the Old Testament in Paradise Lost.
Few genres are as evocatively articulated in a single prose passage as is detective-noir in the novel Farewell, My Lovely. Those few short paragraphs would prove yet more memorable when transported to film.
It happens all at once after some sudden if typical violence. Our protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe, is getting the business from two heavies he thinks are cops, only they aren’t very law-abiding. After roughing him up and warning him away from a crook, they kick him out of their car in the middle of a deserted road.
The more I read about Lyndon Johnson, the more I see how much one can do if heedless of needs for self-reflection, sleep, or a real friend.
Even as Robert A. Caro offers up some admiration for the man who would become the 37th President of the United States, as Johnson aligns himself to causes Caro holds dear, the author does not try to sugarcoat the fact LBJ was first and last a deeply-unpleasant SOB.
Seeing a classic comedy series hit all cylinders for the first time is a sublime feeling. You may know all the jokes and slapstick gags, but seeing all the ingredients blending in the right proportions tickles more than the funny bone. It does the heart good, too.
Asterix The Gladiator is where it all comes together for the “Asterix” French comic- book series. Art, dialogue, premise, resolution, side characters, sly parodies and goofy pratfalls: it all just flows from Goscinny & Uderzo like they have been doing this sort of thing for years.
And they had, too. Just not this well.
Before he wrote this, his most famous work of fiction, J. D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise.” Which is funny, because an alternate title here could be This Novel Has No Plot.
It features a problem student stuck in a rut. Either Holden Caulfield is stumbling through serious adjustment problems, or he is pretending they don’t exist, but those issues are there and form the basis of the story.
The real problem is that story, or lack thereof. Salinger’s remarkable abilities at developing characters and settings are on vivid display, because his one and only novel is a dead loss in the plot department.
Cultural changes flash by too quickly and imperceptibly to pinpoint. But growing up in the 1970s, I remember knowing when everything went irrevocably insane. It was when that newspaper heiress held up a bank and denounced her parents as “pigs.”
I was wrong a lot when I was a boy, but I wasn’t wrong about that. Patty Hearst was a death knell for the America I knew.
Marilyn Baker must have felt that way, too. Even while Hearst was still on the run, calling herself Tania the urban guerilla, public-television newswoman Baker collected her thoughts around this mind-bending story. The result, Exclusive!, combines a sardonic, self-important tone with an honest attempt at deciphering the Hearst riddle.
Tennessee Williams had a knack for giving his plays lovely, off-beat titles. This one has perhaps one of his most evocative and mysterious.
What does it mean, Suddenly Last Summer? What exactly happens? I wondered about this long before I heard of the play, back when it was the title of a sultry, ominous pop hit that seemed always in heavy rotation back in 1983: “It happened one summer/It happened one time/It happened forever/For a short time.”
The Motels didn’t give me much to go on there. For the first three scenes of this one-act play, Tennessee Williams keeps you guessing, too.
