If you’re heading out toward the Berkshires and haven’t yet made plans for Valentine’s Day, consider taking your significant other to brunch at Shakespeare & Company for a five-course meal before the matinee.
By Helen Epstein
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton. Adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Directed by Tina Packer.
Presented by Shakespeare [...]

Though the writing in Nothing Was the Same is often beautiful and moving, the memoir failed to fully engage me.
Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison, Knopf, 208 pp., $25
by Helen Epstein
In 1995, a psychology professor named Kay Redfield Jamison took the unusual step of publishing an article in her local paper, the [...]

Filled with great insights, musical and other, Phil Grabsky’s wonderful documentary on Beethoven depicts “a man of huge intellect and huge heart.”
In Search of Beethoven, a documentary by Phil Grabsky (UK, 2009, 139 min).
At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Wednesday Jan. 13 at 3:05 pm, Thursday January 14 at 5:10 pm., [...]

By Helen Epstein
“Broken Embraces” at Kendall Square and Embassy Cinemas
1: Pedro Almodovar, one of the most interesting directorial sensibilities of our time, whose films probe our infinite varieties of experience in love and work
2: Penelope Cruz, an original who also incarnates the best of the many movie stars — American and European — who [...]

by Bill Marx

For those interested interested in the work and lives of classical musicians, or if you teach feature writing, magazine writing, cultural reporting or non-fiction narrative, the profiles in “Music Talks” make a perfect holiday gift or useful addition to the classroom.
It is a volume of 4000 word-and-under profiles of celebrated artists by resident [...]

Whether you’re a Jungian or a Freudian, think Jung was a genius or charlatan, or even if you’re someone who’s never given much thought to psychotherapy, the exhibition on the “The Red Book” at New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art (which runs through February 15) is worth a visit.
THE RED BOOK by C.G. [...]

The “Red Book” was Jung’s attempt to understand himself as well as the structure of the human personality in general and the relation of the individual to society and the community of the dead.

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & [...]

An examination of the the recent publication and translation (ninety years after it was begun) of C. G. Jung’s confessional meditation “The Red Book.” The volume stands in a select company of books that exerted an enormous influence on social and intellectual history even while it remained unpublished.
THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by [...]

By Helen Epstein
Reckless by Graig Lucas. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Presented by the SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 12, 2009.
Just in case you haven’t noticed it’s edging on toward Christmas, the SpeakEasy Stage Company unwraps “Reckless,” a bauble of a revival by playwright Craig Lucas, whose work for [...]

By Helen Epstein
1) Nov 2: This Monday’s free concert at Jordan Hall celebrates Eastern European composers and players. The unusual musical line-up includes the Haydn Piano Trio in E minor, the Boston premiere of Kati Agócs’s “Awakening Galatea,” Bacewicz’s “Suite for Two Violins,” and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Opus 81. Performance starts [...]