Archive for June, 2008


Resurrecting Lazarus Averbuch, who looked like an anarchist

My review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project appears in The Boston Globe today. Here’s an excerpt: The late, great writer and World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was captured by the Germans and confined to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. When an American air raid destroyed the city, he was put to work carrying civilians’ corpses. The apocalypse . . .

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Shielding the reader from the frenzy

Nothing makes me less interested in discussing literature than being only a quarter of the way through a fatuous book that I feel obligated to finish. (Especially when the book wants to be a contemporary answer to This Side of Paradise but lacks the romance, charm, curiosity, and specificity of place and time that lift Fitzgerald’s juvenilia above mere collegiate . . .

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How to screen The Book of Revelation

  The four people in the United States apart from me who are still dying to see the 2006 Australian film based on Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation might be interested to learn, as I just did from the comments beneath this interview with Thomson and director Ana Kokkinos, that the DVD is available. I see from Amazon customer . . .

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