By Bill Marx
Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility.
Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal generational [...]

By Bill Marx
In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.
Share/Save

By Liao Yiwu, Wen Huang, and Bill Marx
Each time a disaster hits China, we all become refugees and strangers in our own land. — Liao Yiwu

Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, 50, revisits the earthquake damaged Gu Temple in the town of Jiezi in the Sichuan Province. He was interviewing May 12th survivors for his book “The [...]

By Caldwell Titcomb

In “The Bartered Bride,” Jennifer Aylmer plays Marenka, who loves the farmhand Jenik, but is pressured to marry Vasek, the son of a wealthy neighbor.
Boston has had the unusual luck of experiencing two major Czech operas within a few weeks. First, the Boston Lyric Opera gave us Antonin Dvořák’s “Rusalka” (see [...]

Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. Anne Carson, in her introduction to her translation of Euripides’ “Orestes” in “An Oresteia.”

Melissa [...]

Widening literary perspectives is admirable, but as the festival matures somebody at PEN has to decide what World Voices is supposed to be.

By Bill Marx
My admittedly small sampling of the 5th Anniversary of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York last week left me feeling baffled. I attended seven [...]

By Caldwell Titcomb

Richard Pittman ends the 40th season of the Boston Musica Viva on a strong note.
Back in 1969, Richard Pittman founded the Boston Musica Viva (BMV), the first local ensemble dedicated entirely to contemporary music. On May 1, Pittman and his colleagues wound up their 40th season with a concert of three works in [...]

James Toback’s new documentary about boxer Mike Tyson explores a demonic urgency that fattens on the destruction of others.
By Harvey Blume
At the end of “Tyson,” James Toback’s documentary about him, the ex-heavyweight champ, now 43 years old, breathes heavily and falls silent. He seems talked out, and is certainly, by his own admission, punched out. [...]

By Caldwell Titcomb
Back for a return visit to Symphony Hall on April 22 was the National Philharmonic of Russia (NPR), founded in 2003 and not to be confused with the 19-year-old Russian National Orchestra. On the podium for this Celebrity Series event was violin virtuoso Vladimir Spivakov, who will turn 65 in September and is [...]

An erudite, absorbing, and often very funny account of Russia’s pathological inability to condemn the Communist Party.
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co. Publishers, 335 pages
Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

A certain jealous vigilance is to be expected when a Russian reads a book about Russia written by an American. I first [...]