Books

Arts, Books, Red Hook News

Local author Tara Isabella Burton brings Red Hook to her latest novel, by Michael Quinn

You don’t choose to attend a performance at the floating cabaret, the Avalon. The Avalon chooses you. And you’re not only the guest of honor—you’re the only guest. Every song, every dance, every act is written just for you. But the invitation comes at a high price: step on board once, you risk leaving your old life behind forever. This […]

Arts, Books

Books: This One Will Put You to Sleep, Review by Michael Quinn

Hearing someone tell you about a dream they had can make your eyes glaze over. It could be because dreams follow their own logic, unique to each of us. Dreams can feel specific, urgent and compelling after we’ve experienced them, but vague, meandering and uninteresting in the retelling. Cartoonist Roz Chast understands this completely—but she still wants to tell you […]

Arts, Books

Quinn on Books: Mama’s Boy; Matt Caprioli’s One Headlight, review by Michael Quinn

We are children for only a short time, but spend the rest of our lives making sense of our childhoods. It’s an impressionable period of so many firsts. We soak them up like a sponge. In his heartfelt coming-of-age memoir One Headlight, Matt Caprioli (a former arts editor of this paper) wrings out his origin story as a gay man […]

Arts, Books

Quinn on Books: Human Alien-ation | Review of Falling from Trees by Michael Quinn

Not interested in science fiction? A longtime argument holds: Look beyond the setting (say, outer space) and the characters (maybe little green men) to find what’s human at its core—and therefore relatable. On their surface, the 21 short stories in “Falling from Trees” by Michael Fiorito are very much concerned with things like aliens and space travel. The characters are […]

Arts, Books

A Singer Contorts Herself into the Shape of a Poet, Review by Michael Quinn

Review of Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey Review by Michael Quinn Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, a collection of poems by the popular singer Lana Del Rey, wears its Beat-poet influences proudly. It reads like an unedited love letter to and from California, a place of “1,000 fires” and “scorched earth.” The small, hardcover […]

Books, Music

The Beating Heart in The Living Dead, by Kurt Gottschalk

From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so […]

Arts, Books

QUINN ON BOOKS: “Black Lives Matter”

Review of Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski James Baldwin, the late black, gay, American writer, used his work to boldly explore racial and social issues. According to Baldwin, his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room (about an American man in Paris who falls in love with an Italian bartender) was “not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if […]

Books

Quinn on Books: My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp

We inherit many things from our mothers, from the color of our eyes to our bad skin. Is it possible we inherit the traumas they’ve experienced as well? Belgian writer and director Chantal Akerman was the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, and her mother was the subject of much of her work. My Mother Laughs, recently translated from the French […]