Category Archives: Culture

@The Movies with PopPop: Strawberry and Chocolate

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

When we were in Cuba in March, we asked several people to recommend Cuban films. Usually the first one mentioned was Strawberry and Chocolate, a 1993 film directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío and nominated for an Oscar for … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Posted on December 29, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

History of Wolves (2017) by Emily Fridlund is a fantastic book, certainly one of the best I read this year. It’s a whodunnit that manages to preserve dramatic tension throughout, despite having made “the big reveal” quite early in the book. That … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I’ve been a fan of Louise Erdrich for decades, and remember thinking that Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks were as fine a sequence of three novels as I had read. I hadn’t read much from her since then–perhaps a couple novels and … Continue reading →

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@TheMovies with PopPop: The Salesman

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Salesman is another excellent film from Iranian Director Asghar Farhadi. The film won the 2016 Best Foreign Film Oscar, and Farhadi made additional waves when he refused to attend the ceremony in response to Trump’s travel ban. The movie … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Sequels & Other Novels

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{More follow-ups and other works …} I hadn’t realized Colson Whitehead, long before The Underground Railroad, wrote The Noble Hustle, a first person account focusing on one of my favorite topics: poker, and specifically, No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Published in 2014, Whitehead’s book … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Company Town by Madeline Ashby

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Madeline Ashby‘s Company Town deserves a place among the more solid entries in the burgeoning field of young adult dystopian novels that reach beyond a simple displacement of a boy-meets-girl narrative into a bleak future (although, it must be said, … Continue reading →

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@The Movies with PopPop: Battle of the Sexes

Posted on December 2, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Battle of the Sexes is a very good movie – far better than it might have been! While its main plot event is the $100,000 purse tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, the movie is really about … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Shantaram (2003) by Gregory David Roberts is a dizzying, frustrating, entertaining novel. The dizzying and entertaining are entwined: the protagonist is a (slightly? radically?) fictionalized version of Roberts himself, and the novel follows his audacious escape from an Australian jail, his … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Sequels & Other Novels

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{It’s been a little while. Summer, and sequels, and a major storm, and a very long novel. This post marks a few months of sequels/other novels by writers that have previously appeared on Reading Well. I wanted to find out how … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The opening chapter of The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner is perhaps the best thing I’ve read in quite some time. In it, we are introduced to our protagonist through the overlap of two worlds: the first is art, specifically the New … Continue reading →

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