The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz takes a tragic, humorous, violent, and incredibly clever look at three...
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- 4 min
The Lost Weekend
One's too many and a hundred's not enough! But no matter what Nat the barkeep tells Don (his retort, I'm not a drinker, I'm a drunk!),...
- 4 min
First They Killed My Father
First They Killed My Father (Khmer: មុនដំបូងខ្មែរក្រហមសម្លាប់ប៉ារបស់ខ្ញុំ) is a 2017 Cambodian-American film starring the very young but...
- 2 min
Nothing Ever Dies
Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies:...
- 2 min
Raw Deal
This wasn't what I'd expected. A simple enough plot: Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) is in the pen for a crime that isn't revealed to us....
- 1 min
Deep River
Shusaku Endo's 1993 novel Deep River (深い河, or Fukai Kawa) follows a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of Buddhist sites in India. Each...
- 2 min
The Endless Trench
The Endless Trench is a Spanish historical drama with elements of psychological thriller, released in 2019. Directed by Jon Garaño and...
- 2 min
The Virgin Spring
Set in a medieval Sweden wedged between paganism and Christianity and sodden with guilt, The Virgin Spring (1960) tells a tale of rape...
- 2 min
Japanese Fairy Tales
A dragon king, tongue-clipped sparrow, sake-drinking tortoise, vengeful rabbit, pitiful hare, flying paper crane, and luminous beings...
- 1 min
The Killing
Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film noir The Killing is a heist flick told in three ways. We get the documentary style first, with a narrator...
- 1 min
The White Tiger
The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga is light prose loaded with scathing dark humor. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Adiga's first...
- 1 min
The Sound of Waves
The Sound of Waves (1954) by Yukio Mishima is a fairly slim novel that rather surprised me. After reading his Death in Midsummer and...
- 3 min
Sansho the Bailiff
Sansho the Bailiff (1954; also called Sanshō Dayū, and in Japanese 山椒大夫) is a film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi that Japanese cinema fans,...
- 2 min
The Memory Police
The Memory Police, a novel by Yōko Ogawa, was published in 1994 and then translated by Stephen Snyder for its 2019 release in English....
- 1 min
The Reed Cutter & Captain Shigemoto's Mother
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (July 24, 1886–July 30, 1965) was a master at burrowing right down into the heart of human relationships while...
- 3 min
Miss Oyu
Miss Oyu (Oyū-sama, in Japanese) is a 1951 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's 1932 novella entitled The...
- 2 min
Wild Strawberries
Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film Wild Strawberries is a gem I'd been meaning to see for ages. I'd read about how much influence it's had on...
- 2 min
Chernobyl
Greyness is how I've kicked off 2020, watching first The Road (2009) then HBO's miniseries Chernobyl (2019). No special reason for these...
- 1 min
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
An epistolary novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Vietnamese-American author and poet Ocean Vuong is one of those rare and...
- 2 min
Bad Elements
Bad Elements by Ian Buruma was published in 2001 so, considering how dramatically China has grown over the past couple decades, I almost...
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