Category Archives: Culture

@The Movies with PopPop: Battle of the Sexes

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

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

{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

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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@The Movies with PopPop: I Am Not Your Negro

James Baldwin, one of the mid-20th centuries best writers and speakers – some might insist on an “arguably” in there, but I’ll take my chances! – is often overlooked or at least under appreciated as an interpreter and prophet of … Continue reading

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Reading Well: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing (2016) belongs to an honored tradition of African-American fiction, a generation by generation narrative tracing a family’s life from a moment a few centuries distant in West Africa, through the horrors of capture and slavery (and often encompassing moments of … Continue reading

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Hero

The Hero, a 2017 film directed by Brett Haley, is a surprisingly strong, leisurely, contemplative and elegiac film that seems made for, and is made by Sam Elliott. He plays Lee Hayden, an actor in his 70’s, famous for one … Continue reading

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Reading Well: This Census Taker by China Miéville

China Miéville is probably my favorite author of the twenty-first century, and when I saw that he recently released not one, but two new books, I was both excited and a little hesitant. Miéville had a run–from 1998’s King Rat through the … Continue reading

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@The Movies with PopPop: Seymour: An Introduction

Seymour: An Introduction (no, not the Salinger short story of the same name, but a 2014 film directed by Ethan Hawke) is an extraordinary documentary that will charm and fascinate anyone who has either played or tried to play an … Continue reading

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Reading Well: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Published in 2016, Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad is a very hot property: best seller, Oprah Book Club selection, and extraordinarily topical. It’s not quite a work of historical fiction, but it’s not far off: the novel traces the story of an … Continue reading

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