-
Pachinko, Lee (2017)
In a general sense, the events of Pachinko might have happened to any of a billion immigrant families. Lee’s carefully painted details of Korean life in twentieth-century Japan…
4 min read
-
The Doors of Perception, Huxley (1954)
Writing coherently about a psychedelic experience is not easy. Believe me, I’ve tried. The result is usually a mix of bad poetry and worse speechifying. (Evaluated under conditions…
4 min read
-
Grizzly Man (2005)
Over thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell spent tens of thousands of hours living among brown grizzly bears in remote Alaska. That fact is far more remarkable than the circumstances…
4 min read
-
Dimanche à Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (2005)
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind in the late 1970s, and for the next couple decades made music in relative obscurity.…
4 min read
-
When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut (2021)
I respect Benjamin Labatut’s effort. A hard border between fiction and non-fiction is unhelpful. The recent surge in “auto-fiction”—which, in truth, has always been with us: people write…
4 min read
-
Gilead, Robinson (2004)
It’s hard to believe that some works of art were created by just one person. Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, for example, or di Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Their…
4 min read
