A few weeks ago, I spent all day waiting for the Houston postal service to deliver my copy of Red Letter Year from an office in Charlottesville, a package mailed overnight because the only reliable thing about the mail here is its inability to arrive on time. And the record came not a day too […]
Maybe I’m too young for bouts of nostalgia, but cassettes becoming nearly obsolete in my lifetime entitles me to a sentimental moment, and here it is:
I’ll admit it: The Taming of the Shrew boils my blood, and it’s all I can do to maintain my delicate reviewer’s composure and resist lobbing certain easily called-upon “–ist”s and “–ism”s like hand grenades. Anyone who’s seen Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You is more or less familiar with the play’s goings-on: […]
We’ve all heard of brain food, and the debut book of poems from Kevin McFadden, associate program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book, is a full-course meal for the gray matter. One of a handful of books in the new Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series, Hardscrabble offers pun after home-cooked pun, and the […]
“Suffering is an enormous turn-on,” Reverend D intones in a voice that is dark and desperate, but it’s difficult to picture: How Hester La Negrita—homeless, hungry and hunkered down under a bridge beneath graffiti she can’t read—could have seduced a young man, a junk merchant, a doctor, a welfare worker and a Reverend. And yet […]