From Kritikos, Senayon Olaoluwa (Ibadan): The Author Never Dies: Roland Barthes and the Postcolonial Project; and Travis English (Stony Brook): Hans Haacke, or the Museum as Degenerate Utopia.
From The Futurist, an article on the intersection of economics and the arts. The art journalist Lindsay Pollock’s The Girl With the Gallery reconstructs the life of a groundbreaking and largely overlooked woman who served as the midwife for the emergence of the modern art market in America. Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, stands up for American exceptionalism in the arts. A review of Best American Magazine Writing 2006, ed. by Graydon Carter. A review of Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists (and more).
Was Huck Faulknerian? A review of Jon Clinch’s Finn, a novel about Huck Finn’s father, and decides that it owes a heavy debt to a literary figure apart from Mark Twain. Author at work: When it first strikes you that your book isn't going to be the next Huck Finn, don't wallow in despair. Take a long walk. From The University Bookman, an essay on how small presses rescue classic genre writers from oblivion. Fiction critic Lionel Shriver explains why, for a novelist, reviewing is a dangerous game.
From Sign and Sight, escapology and the endgame: Peter Kümmel reports from this year's Theatertreffen in Berlin, the yearly rendezvous for the ten best plays on the German-language stage. A review of All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden. A review of The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth Century America.
To be or not to be a philosopher did not concern Shakespeare, so far as we know. And we know very little: A review of Shakespeare The Thinker. Academic spitball fights can be tedious and polemical. But the May 31 New York Review of Books brings a refreshingly brief and engaging exchange on, would you believe, William Shakespeare's attitude toward political power (and the exchange between Richard Strier and Stephen Greenblatt). The introduction to Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language.
From Powells.com, a review of The Poems of Georg Trakl by Margitt Lehbert. Absent Friends: That is Not Sad; This is Not Funny: Adam Golaski resurrects the poetry of Paul Hannigan in all its acerbic and ominous brilliance. The unpublished poetry of Bonnie Parker, America's most notorious woman gangster, has emerged in the prison notebook she kept. John Ash's latest collection, The Parthian Stations, suggests that time in Istanbul has transformed the poet's work, writes William Wootten. An exchange of identity crises: A review of The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi.
Writing While Arab: The Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), with a membership of 215 poets, fiction writers, playwrights, bloggers, filmmakers and others, holds its conference in Dearborn, Mich. The biggest little country in the world: In Search of Kazakhstan explores the vast land where the Soviets dumped their dissidents and tested nuclear bombs. Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, returns with a story about Afghan women in A Thousand Splendid Suns (and more and more and more and more). And a review of The Sleeping Buddha: the story of Afghanistan through the Eyes of One Family by Hamida Ghafour
