David Lazar’s ‘Celeste Holm Syndrome’ Appreciates Hollywood’s Unsung Character Actors
David Lazar's Celeste Holm Syndrome documents how character actor work is about scene-defining, not scene-stealing.
Christopher John Stephens
The Traditional American Motifs in Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’
Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is 55 years old this weekend. The middle album of his masterful mid-1960's trilogy saw Dylan saying goodbye to his role as a noble and pure folk spokesman.
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ Brought Elegiac Depth and Youthful Romanticism to Heartland Rock
Forty-five years after Born to Run's release, the breakthrough third LP from American music legend Bruce Springsteen has lost none of its passion and promise.
On Bob Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ Everything Old Is New Again, Again
Bob Dylan's first album of original material since 2012, Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a suitably grim, brilliant collection of ten songs for our dark times.
Confinement and Escape: Emma Donoghue and E.L. Doctorow in Our Time of Self-Isolation
Emma Donoghue's Room and E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley define and confront life within limited space.
‘Yours, Jean’ Is a Perfect Mixture of Tragedy, Repressed Desire, and Poor Impulse Control
Lee Martin's Yours, Jean is a perfectly balanced and heartbreaking mix of true crime narrative and literary fiction.
Solitude Stands in the Window: Thoreau’s ‘Walden’
Henry David Thoreau's Walden as a 19th century model for 21st century COVID-19 quarantine.
Marc Maron’s Private Grief on a Public Stage
The risky healing power of Marc Maron's WTF podcast eulogy to Lynn Shelton.
Some of One World’s Comfort Songs Are Off-Key
One World: Together at Home and what our choice of anthems says about how we cope with a crisis.
Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” Is His First New Song Since the Nobel Laureate
Bob Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" is a 17-minute story song about JFK's assassination and a suitable audio dispatch from and for the end times.
Joan Didion’s Crystal-Clear Vision Only Got Better with Age
Reading the Library of America’s comprehensive anthology, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s, is like walking out of the rain and into a compelling time warp.
Harold Bloom’s ‘The American Literary Canon’
The authors included in Harold Bloom's The American Literary Canon conform to a singular American aesthetic that, in Bloom's world, makes them superior to the spectrum of the American experience.