I interview Naomi Iizuka about her translation of Shakespeare's Richard II for Play On Shakespeare—how she kept the poetry while making it accessible for modern audiences.
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Reviews of the 2022 time-travel novels Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub — from someone who tried writing her own time-travel novel during lockdown.
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I reread Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic books, about four children with unusual magical powers, and think I actually liked them more the second time around!
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A tribute to my late friend Terry Teachout in the guise of a review of his Balanchine biography, All in the Dances.
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Reviews of some Golden Age detective fiction: Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey short stories.
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Reviews of two recent books that expose the failings of contemporary ballet culture: Georgina Pazcoguin’s memoir Swan Dive and Chloe Angyal’s journalistic Turning Pointe.
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Reviews of two novels about children who stumble into the London theater scene and become stagestruck: Gary Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer and Noel Streatfeild’s Theatre Shoes.
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Reviews of two books all about arguing about Shakespeare: Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars and James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America.
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I may be an American but I spent the Platinum Jubilee week reading plays about the modern British monarchy: King Charles III and The Audience.
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My friend Stuart Bousel and I discuss liberals, conservatives, generational archetypes, and other reasons we find Heroes of the Fourth Turning such an intriguing play.
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Reviews of The Searchers and The Alice Network: two historical fiction novels that target very different audiences, but both involve an unusual duo searching for a missing girl.
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The feminine urge to revisit a YA fantasy quartet that told you it was OK to be a smart, unconventional girl.
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Reviews of Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf, the plays that round out the 20th century and August Wilson’s Century Cycle.
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I’m not the only millennial who has big overweening thoughts about the state of the collapsing world, while also being desperate to get my little bourgeois life in order!
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Reviewing a new Great Gatsby adaptation that brings the sensibility of a queer, Asian-American speculative fiction writer into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s WASP-y world.
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Reviews of Seven Guitars, Fences, and Two Trains Running, the plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle covering the postwar and Civil Rights era.
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Reviews of the first four plays (1900s-1930s) in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, plus, how I stumbled upon an autographed Wilson collection in my local library system.
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My biggest takeaway from reading the complete works of Shakespeare during the pandemic is that Coriolanus and Measure for Measure are incredibly underrated.
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A classic but mediocre Egyptology novel (Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars) and an underrated but ingenious Egyptology novel (Phillips’ The Egyptologist).
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Six months late, I finally get around to blogging a list of the books & plays that helped get me through the strangest year in recent memory.
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