With each passing year of the intensive summer writing camp I co-direct, our high schoolers are writing more stories about misfit adolescents who find social acceptance in secretive cults: ninjas, vampires, cabals apparently devoted to candlelit backstabbing. Their stories are wildly imaginative, apocalyptic, futuristic yet noirish. The trend owes much, of course, to Harry Potter […]
Adam Sobsey
Bio: Adam Sobsey (@sobsey) writes about wine and culture for INDY Week.Twitter: http://twitter.com/sobsey
Posted inCulture
A Burmese Christmas: a last-minute gift recommendation
The Free Burma Fighting Peacock, a symbol of resistance Chances are good that you have forgotten all about Cyclone Nargis, which made landfall on May 2, 2008 in Burma’s Irawaddy Delta and reached the country’s largest city, Rangoon (or Yangon). Nargis may have killed as many as 500,000 people, and the storm laid waste to […]
Posted inCulture
Walking home after seeing Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations
Photo by Alan Dehmer/ Manbites DogLormarev Jones in Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations. I had the good fortune to see the Sunday matinee of Manbites Dog Theater’s production of Will Eno’s caustic, coruscating Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations, directed by Jeff Storer. I say good fortune not only because the production—a collection of […]
Posted inArt
Is Julia Glass’ new novel, The Widower’s Tale, realism or fantasy?
The Widower’s Tale By Julia Glass Pantheon; 416 pp. If you know previous works by Julia Glass, like her National Book Award-winning debut, Three Junes (2002), you’ll probably be inclined to take her fourth novel, The Widower’s Tale, as another example of well-crafted bourgeois realism. The book seems to encourage this view, with its intertwined […]
Posted inCulture
Eggers sunnyside up at Duke
Dave Eggers spoke at Duke’s Page Auditorium last night The theme of writer-humanitarian Dave Eggers’s talk to a large audience at Page Auditorium last night was simple and almost shockingly optimistic: “We are a nation that instinctively wants to help people,” he said early on. “This is still, and I think always will be, the […]
Posted inArt
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War is a familiar tour of duty
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War By Karl Marlantes Grove/ Atlantic; 592 pp. The first 400 pages of Karl Marlantes’ debut, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, are taut and exciting. After an almost pornographically gruesome field surgery scene involving a leech in a urethra, a Marine company is ordered to abandon its […]
Posted inArt
New Yorker writer Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia
Travels in Siberia By Ian Frazier Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 544 pp. Ian Frazier appears at Quail Ridge Books & Music Thursday, Nov. 4, at 7:30 p.m. It would be incongruous to publish a small, tidy travelogue about a vast and unruly place. Ian Frazier’s garrulous Travels in Siberia, at nearly 500 pages long, rambles […]
Posted inArt
Empty Pleasures views 20th-century America through the progress of its sweeteners
Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda By Carolyn de la Peña University of North Carolina Press; 320 pp. The first artificial sweetener, saccharin, was discovered accidentally in 1879. A Johns Hopkins chemist, trying to come up with a food preservative, licked his finger while experimenting with coal-tar derivatives. The chemical […]
Posted inArt
Walking in black women’s footsteps: Two important new histories of the Civil Rights movement
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistence—New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power By Danielle L. McGuire Knopf; 352 pp. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC Edited by Faith S. Holsaert et al. University of Illinois […]
Posted inArt
Ghost & Spices’ Six Degrees of Separation
Six Degrees of Separation Ghost and Spice Productions At Common Ground Theatre Through Oct. 23 Rachel Klem’s zippy, antic but concise staging of John Guare’s rapidly aging but still invigorating 1990 Pulitzer-winning comedy, Six Degrees of Separation, wakes up a piece that could easily fall flat on its face in these days of recession. Very […]