I’m thrilled to announce that “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” is back! Season 4 of this podcast kicks off with an interview with singer and actress Casey Keeler, who played the Fairy Queen in a concert production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” … Read the rest
(April Rose Schneider has written for Litkicks about novelist Richard Farina and Rush lyricist Neil Peart. This is by far her most personal piece. Thanks, April. —Marc)
“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.” — Euripidies, from “Prometheus”
Einar Wegener—Europe’s best known transgender person in the … Read the rest
It’s a new year and a new universe (because, let’s face it, the universe is always changing, and always new) … and I’m now writing with a new name. So I thought I’d reach for something familiar and easy and tell you briefly about what I’ve been reading and … Read the rest
As Mike Leigh’s majestic new movie Mr. Turner begins, the famous British artist J. M. W. Turner’s father buys pigments for his son in a dusty London shop. The vast psychedelic arrays of glass jars filled with powders of viridian, chrome, cobalt, barium and ultramarine seem as magical as Diagon … Read the rest
We need more movies about philosophers. I can only think of very few examples to mention, but David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film about the rivalry between early psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, shows that the format can work. This is an intelligent and straightforward narrative … Read the rest
When life gets dreary, there’s always Gilbert and Sullivan. This British duo’s creative track record is almost as impressive as that of the Beatles, who took over the world in similar fashion three-quarters of a century later. They left us three wildly popular masterpieces: HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of … Read the rest
As a native Romanian who is also a novelist, I’m very intrigued and, frankly, somewhat baffled by America’s obsession with vampires and the Dracula legend.
Vampire novels and movies seem to keep growing in popularity, even as they’re spoofed by yet other vampire novels and movies. From what I can … Read the rest
1. Okay, enough of that French stuff. A recent link on Books Inq. reminded me of one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, the neat, smoothly vicious British satire from 1888 and 1889 called Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith.
Diary, originally published as a serial … Read the rest
Between June 2009 and December 2010, Michael Norris explored Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, in these pages. Here, with original artwork by David Richardson, is the entire sequence.
