The setting is the English countryside in the early 1960s. The time is winter — what seems like eternal winter. Little Anna Wyatt’s mother, a German war refugee, leaves the house one morning, never to return. There’s been an accident, a neighbor explains — something about the car, the fog. Mummy, Anna eventually understands, has …
I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” — for which Benioff was asked to write the screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood. (They should just get it over with …
Westerners hardly paid attention when the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky thanked the Russian government for jailing him in the part of Siberia where the Decembrists were exiled, after a failed uprising against the czar in 1825. But Khodorkovsky, who was fishing for public sympathy closer to home, knew exactly what he was doing: there’s no …
The bar or bat mitzvah is a religious ceremony that initiates a Jewish boy or girl into adulthood. But you already knew that. You watched Krusty the Klown have a belated bar mitzvah on ”The Simpsons,” and you remember that Samantha arranged a bat mitzvah after-party on ”Sex and the City.” B’nai mitzvah — the …
Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, ”Snow White and Russian Red,” is a blustery romp through the disaffected world of post-Communist Polish youth. Stranded in a country that’s no longer Communist but isn’t yet integrated into the West, young Poles compensate for their sense of political and economic abandonment with drugs and sex. Maslowska describes their disdainful …
The emotional landscape of childhood, with its naïveté and surprise, is so difficult to reclaim that its greatest chroniclers – Lewis Carroll in ”Alice in Wonderland,” Boris Pasternak in ”Liuvers’s Childhood” — have often resorted to fantasy or abstraction. In her first collection, ”There Are Jews in My House,” where all but one of the …
