| Literary Arts Articles |
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Not just another Beauty and the Beast Anyone who has ever watched the cartoon "Gargoyles" remembers the impossible love that blossomed between Goliath, the leader of the gargoyles, and Elisa, the savvy New York City cop. He was an enormous, frightening creature who turned to stone during the day, while she was an ordinary (but beautiful and talented) human. Their love remained, sadly, unconsummated. Just as in the cartoon, Andrew Davidson’s novel, The Gargoyle, also tells the story of a man who, despite his frightening appearance, has an unconsummated love affair with a beautiful woman. He, like the stone gargoyles that she carves, is carved away in order to become whole. |
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A Good Cause for a Smile Mary Roach writes in Bonk ‘s introduction that her study of sexual physiology should not come as a shock to readers familiar with her other books, Stiff (the world of cadavers and undertakers) and Spook (the milieu of the supernatural). Perhaps the most understanding person in Roach’s life is her husband who apparently didn’t mind using vacation time to go to London in order to subject himself to a coital imaging machine for a book that his wife would later title subtitle: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. |
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Pace is the Trick In the 1980s, if you took the train to work in Chicago, you might have seen Scott Turow scribbling what later became known as Presumed Innocent. Critics praised the rapid but even pacing of the novel which might have been affected by his commute. Judgment Day, by Bay Area corporate attorney Sheldon Siegel, is the sixth in a series of crime novels involving ex-husband and wife team attorney Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez. |
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I Go Searching For Music Katie Ford and I crossed paths for the first time on a sultry day in Iowa City. I was quickly enthralled by her keen sense for what makes good poetry, her urgent probing of every line of verse she encountered, her willingness to push further into the heart of things, to carry conversation about the art to fresh and exhilarating levels. Ford’s own poems are durable and elliptical and lovely. Her work, like the work of so many poets of this generation, eschews easy categorization into school or style pigeonholes. It is neither inaccessible nor easy -- and thank goodness on both counts. |
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Minnesota Malaise Meets New York Neurosis The ellipsis, in grammatical terms, is what English teachers would call an “unsaid thought.” For therapists, the ellipsis is their bread and butter. Once the patient fills in the ellipsis, the job is theoretically done. The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt creates a panorama of characters that suffer from ellipsis override. |
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