Tandeta: critics, Greene, Fincher, arcades, Patti Smith, Pollock
Is the age of the critic over? / Why Brighton Rock is still peerless after all these years / The torrid liaison between Graham Greene‘s fiction and the cinema / Fincher, Aronofsky et al on directing [via @seanjcostello] / Rick Poynor‘s d érive through the arcades of Paris / Patti Smith is writing a detective […]
Coming Back to Your Senses
Human condition has always been a major theme for Barnes, but he used to observe it with empathy and amusement, not jaded irony and sad listlessness. The impression these stories leave is that their author is not enjoying the company of his characters, so why should you? With this in mind you turn a page, ready to toss the book aside, and check yourself just in time. For if the beginning numbs you down, what follows promptly brings your feelings back — quite literally, as each of the five stories in the second part centres on one of the main physical senses. These pieces, “more of pulse than of thought”, fully reward you at the end changing your mind about the whole collection.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Julian Barnes‘Pulse.
3:AM Cult Hero: Stephen Crane
By Robert O’Connor. There were two giants of American literature in the 1890s that everyone else tried to be: Mark Twain, the witty humorist and Horatio Alger, the sentimental moralist. One man who eschewed both of them and created his own style. He also may have inspired future rebellions against literary conventions with his memorable […]