Word: giroux
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What these two isolated facts have to do with each other is made resplendently luminous in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 164 pages; $30), a long narrative poem with a number of stories on its mind. One is what Walcott modestly calls his "inexact and blurred biography" of the painter Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were driven out of Portugal, who chose to practice his art in Europe rather than the raw island paradise of his birth. A parallel account involves Walcott: his boyhood fascination with the reproductions of European masterpieces he found in books...
Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well...
...what's it really about? The question arises because the author of the new novel In America (Farrar Straus Giroux; 387 pages; $26) is the formidably intelligent critic Susan Sontag. Ergo, a long story that looks like a historical romance, a celebration of a 19th century woman who, in contemporary parlance, had it all--devoted husband (a Polish count, no less), passionate younger lover and glittering career--must be hedged about with postmodern ironies, runic clues to the reader not to mistake surface for substance. Mustn...
...Great Plains (1989) Ian Frazier transformed himself from a supremely hip New Yorker humorist into a serious but never somber chronicler of the American heartland. In On the Rez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 311 pages; $25) Frazier entertainingly continues this investigation, although his interest is now concentrated on a specific patch of the wide-open spaces, the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. Why this place and these people? While researching Great Plains, Frazier met and became friends with Le War Lance, a Sioux man with colorful if not always credible stories...