by Lucasta Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 2022
Subtly intertwining biographical detail with crisp readings of the poetry, Miller creates an insightful, vibrant portrait.
Excavating the backstories behind a handful of the iconic romantic poet’s works.
British literary critic Miller turns to the life and works of John Keats (1795-1821), who, she admiringly writes, is “never a fixed entity. He’s always in motion.” Her goal in this thoughtful, personal appreciation is to get “under the skin” of nine of his greatest poems as “entry points” into a “young man caught in the fragile and jittery amber of the Romantic era.” Miller draws extensively on Keats’ “sinewy, free-flowing” letters, “among the best ever written in English.” His second published poem, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” about reading, gained the novice 21-year-old poet some critical attention. “Chapman’s Homer,” writes Miller, reworked “the metaphor of the sonnet itself, on to another planet.” A year later, after giving up medical studies, Keats composed “Endymion” when his brother was suffering from tuberculosis. Harshly received, it was a “failed experiment, but it has indeed outlived him.” Miller also shows how “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a “verbal feast, its images appealing to all the senses,” is Keats’ “most explicitly erotic poem.” “On a sheer technical level there is much to unpack” in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and Miller’s up to the challenge. Keats created his own original stanza form, she notes, for “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in “one fell swoop,” in which he “incorporates the idea of melting into the very grammar of his lines.” One of his most famous poems, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” includes a line that has been discussed in classrooms countless times: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Miller suggests that “To Autumn” is “probably today’s most widely read Romantic-era nature poem,” and she amply demonstrates why the poet’s “voice, marginal and avant-garde in his own day, retains its vertiginous originality.”
Subtly intertwining biographical detail with crisp readings of the poetry, Miller creates an insightful, vibrant portrait.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-65583-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss
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by Steve Martin
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by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne
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