A teacher becomes obsessed with a charismatic family in Claire Messud’s fierce portrait of thwarted creativity. As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage
Schlagwort-Archive: Salon
Artikel: With crowdsourcing, everyone’s a detective now
Reddit got it all wrong. So why do we all think we have the expertise to solve crimes after watching “CSI”?
Rezension: Kate Atkinson: “Life After Life”
Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life,”is not quite a time-travel narrative, but it does dangle before its reader’s nose that most tantalizing of impossible offers, “a chance to do it again and again,” as one character puts it, “until we finally did get it right.”
Artikel: Femininjas: Women in fiction fight back
From “Medea” to the “Millennium” series, women characters use stealth, exile and cunning to hold their own against patriarchy.
Artikel: Are the Ravens responsible for the fall of the house of Edgar Allan Poe?
The city of Baltimore — and the Ravens — rely on their most famous writer’s legacy. And they’re letting it crumble.
Artikel: The case of the celibate detectives
Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot were defiantly asexual. What did Sir Doyle and Agatha Christie have against sex?
Artikel: Desecrating Poe
The horror of “The Following” comes not just from the storytelling, but from the way it maligns a literary legacy.
Rezension (Hörbuch): Lydia Cooper: “My Second Death”
The narrator of Lydia Cooper’s “My Second Death” has antisocial personality disorder. But how crazy is she, really?
Filmrezension: “John Dies at the End”
Exorcists, zombies and bromance – Campy B-movie farce and an ominous allegory in one, “John Dies at the End” is an inventive, crazy genre-bender.
Rezension: Ellen Ullman: “By Blood”
Ellen Ullman is a novelist, critic and computer programmer so well known for her incisive, highly personal writing on technology that when her latest novel “By Blood“ appeared, even the New York Times was surprised to discover that it’s set long before the Web.
Artikel: Birth of the femme fatale!
They were Hollywood’s first female rebels, using their smarts and sexiness to undermine traditonal male power.
Artikel: Stephen King: My mother-in-law scares me
Novelist Stephen King spoke to creative writing students at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. One student tried to find out what scares the horror master.
Rezension: Caldwell Crosby: “The Great Pearl Heist”
A cat-and-mouse game in the streets of Edwardian London and the world’s most valuable necklace — how is it that no one has turned the true story told in Molly Caldwell Crosby’s “The Great Pearl Heist” into a movie?
Interview: Oliver Stone
The cinematic renegade talks about Obama, FDR, his new Showtime series and the myth of American exceptionalism.
Rezension: Karen Engelmann: “The Stockholm Octavo”
Powdered wigs, poisoned fans and a lively deck of cards: Karen Engelmann’s “The Stockholm Octavo” is a bonbon box filled with treats designed to appeal to lovers of literary historical thrillers.
Rezension: Damien Echols: “Life After Death”
Everyone knows that Damien Echols has a remarkable, chilling story to tell. He spent 18 years (half his life) on death row for a crime he did not commit. With two teenage friends, Echols was convicted in 1994 for the murders of three little boys.
Artikel: “The Wire” is NOT like Dickens
“‘The Wire’ is like a Victorian novel” – this facile, cocktail-party insight has been cropping up a lot lately, although it’s hard to see why someone who loves the HBO series about life and crime in contemporary Baltimore and the fiction of 19th-cent. England would insist upon it.
Rezension: Errol Morris: “A Wilderness of Error”
Some believe with all their hearts that MacDonald is guilty. Others believe with equal vehemence that he’s not. By the end of his new book Morris is careful to state that he does not know whether MacDonald is the killer.
Rezension: Laura Lippman: “And When She Was Good”
Lippman’s latest is “And When She Was Good,” a title that saucily suggests the novel will be racier than it is. “And When She Was Good” is in essence a character study, though the basic thread of its plot does generate a good amount of suspense.
Kurzrezensionen: Flynn, Hughes, Millar, Highsmith, Lippman and others
Sarah Weinman’s summer reading list: smart crime fiction by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), Dorothy B. Hughes (“In a Lonely Place”), Margaret Millar (“Beast in View”), Patricia Highsmith (“Deep Water”) Laura Lippman (“And When She Was Good”) and others.