Friday, October 17, 2014
Gabriel is a searing experience to read, filled with sadness but also humor and forbearance, and may give comfort to parents who are dealing with difficult children.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:10AMThursday, October 2, 2014
Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:44AMMonday, September 22, 2014
Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles is a stunning novel about class and marriage and power; Can Xue's The Last Lover is a tedious surrealistic farce.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:06AMWednesday, August 27, 2014
We become participants in a chapter of American art history that raises important questions about what fame means, how much a part luck plays, and how we treat our artists. .
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:16PMSaturday, July 26, 2014
Precision and obvious competence were only part of the story. What made this concert from The Young Artists Orchestra so special was the joy conveyed by these fledgling musicians, who, it is…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:06AMFriday, July 18, 2014
A Replacement Life explores what America means to Russian immigrants whose cunning and sophistication often lead them into trouble, but whose plight is being recorded in fiction by their ama…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:31AMWednesday, June 4, 2014
Singer Ute Gfrerer name should be spread far and wide to anyone -- Jewish or not -- who is interested in the music of that period, for this is first-rate work that should be heard for genera…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:04PMFriday, May 23, 2014
Taken as a whole, "The Poets' Wives" is a fascinating, brave novel whose love of poetry breathes through all three sections.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:07AMFriday, April 25, 2014
Beneath the humor and the warmth and the charm of this novel, author Eve Harris bears witness to an existence far more complex and troubled than Ultra-Orthodox Jews might like to admit.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:46AMThursday, April 10, 2014
Perhaps a movie such as "The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is much more than a zany comedy, can lead us back, as I think director Wes Anderson may have intended, to the fabulous writing of Ste…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:10AMWednesday, April 9, 2014
"To the End of the Land" is about the devastation of war, how war erodes the human spirit, yet how that spirit is far more resilient that we may have ever suspected.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:08AMWednesday, March 12, 2014
Given all the terror and brutality we have lived through just in the thirteen years of this new, 21st century, the story of people running drugs back in the '70s doesn’t seem to have much …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:08PMWednesday, February 5, 2014
When the septuagenarian protagonist of this novel finally gets out of her claustrophobic apartment, everything changes.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:18AMThursday, January 16, 2014
We become increasingly aware that we are in the mind of a doctor who has taught himself to observe carefully, who has an amazingly strong will to survive, and who chooses not to waste precio…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:30PMWednesday, November 27, 2013
Aminatta Forna has given us a novel that belies its modest premise, a book about how the human mind protects itself by not knowing, yet sometimes, due to unexpected circumstances, comes to t…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:24AMFriday, November 8, 2013
We are left with a somewhat scattered narrative written in the third person with an omniscient narrator that moves from one inner life to another, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes lea…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:48AMThursday, October 31, 2013
Nina Schuyler's uneven novel raises some interesting questions in the course of the protagonist's quest, and there are many fascinating details about Japan and Noh plays and the power of sil…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:26PMTuesday, October 15, 2013
This small but important book is a collection of stories about being human. It explores, even probes, the inner recesses about its characters without pretense or flamboyance.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:24AMSunday, August 4, 2013
This novella is a gift to all of us who love Patrick White's strangely alive prose and a welcome addition to his oeuvre. And for those who don’t know his work, it is a terrific way to be i…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:45AMTuesday, July 23, 2013
The agile hand of adaptor and director Aaron Posner has given us a production of Chaim Potok’s novel “The Chosen” that our children and grandchildren must see. The Chosen, …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:45PMThursday, July 18, 2013
Austin Ratner's follow up to "The Jump Artist" is an an exuberant, terrific novel -- for its weaknesses, as well as its strengths.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:48AMSaturday, June 22, 2013
What is perhaps most astonishing is that families of every economic stripe, despite the sad fact that schools all over the country are cutting back on arts programs.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:23AMThursday, May 23, 2013
This fascinating book ends, leaving the reader with all sorts of questions -- but that is exactly what really good fiction always does. Opening our minds, etching characters in our imaginat…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:58AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
While reading Andre Maurois' "Climates" you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:52AMTuesday, April 16, 2013
There are so many characters to root for in "The Wanting" that you tend to read with your head swimming, and with an increasing sense of urgency as the senseless is revealed to have a logic …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:20PMTuesday, February 19, 2013
This is not just a story of a plucky girl succeeding; in weaving her complicated story and giving credit to those who helped her to understand how to think critically, to develop her own mor…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:09PMSunday, February 3, 2013
Though written in 1984, The House of Jasmine's description of widespread political corruption and social decay in the Sadat era is powerfully relevant to the uprisings of 2011 when Mubarak w…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:18AMTuesday, January 8, 2013
Uzma Aslam Khan is a wonderful writer whose descriptions of the northern part of Pakistan and the fast fading way of life that had been lived there for hundreds of years are sometimes stunni…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:53AMSaturday, December 8, 2012
Touted in author Jonas Jonasson’s native Sweden as the perfect antidote to the grim noir Swedish trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this delicious book has sold over …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:11PMSunday, November 18, 2012
Isaiah Sheffer's lasting contribution will be his almost single-handed revival of interest in that most beguiling of fictional forms, the short story.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:48PMSunday, October 28, 2012
I can see why celebrated Korean writer Young-ha Kim was attracted to this real life story of about a thousand Koreans emigrating from Asia in 1904.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:06AM 
