Monthly Archives: March 2009

Bessie Head: A Question of Power

I own a first edition of this book (thank you Roanoke City Public Library), and though it has an excellent cover painting which is strikingly apt, the jacket text and two blurbs (by Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni) are terrible at giving any idea of what the book is actually about. The jacket text makes [...]

21 March 2009, 22:55 Comments (0)

Twelve-tone Film Scores

Here are three that Wikipedia lists and a fourth I dug up. There must be many others that use serialism at least partly, but I don’t know them offhand. Anyone want to chime in? Benjamin Frankel: The Prisoner (1955) Ernest Gold: On the Beach (1959) Benjamin Frankel: Curse of the Werewolf (1961) David Shire: Taking [...]

9 March 2009, 23:53 Comments (2)

Attila Bartis: Tranquility

This book just won the Three Percent Best Translation of 2008 prize, and while I can’t speak to the translation (though I have it on good authority that it’s excellent–thanks GJ), I was happy to have it win, being a booster of Hungarian lit in general (and Laszlo Krasznahorkai in particular). Jeff Waxman describes a [...]

5 March 2009, 23:10 Comments (1)