Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 17
December 20, 2023
Reader’s Corner: Best Graphic Novels of 2023
Publishers Weekly‘s annual critics poll of the year’s best graphic novels came out today. I was one of the lucky contributors who put in their two cents. Happily, some of my favorites made the cut, such as:
December 19, 2023
Reader’s Corner: Best Books of the Year
It’s that time of year when a writer’s mind turns to best-of lists. And so we have the annual PopMatters best books feature, which compiles arguments for some of their writers’ favorite fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. I contributed several of the books that knocked my hair back this year (The Deluge, Brooklyn …
December 18, 2023
Screening Room: ‘The Crime is Mine’
Francois Ozon’s absolutely smashing new movie, The Crime is Mine, opens in late December. My review for Slant Magazine is here: François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with …
December 17, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Watch Some TV
Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) does not have a lot of patience for the more precious kinds of writing practices out there. He told Esquire: I think a lot of people have this idea that you can only write if you have hours at a desk, if the conditions are right, if you have …
December 11, 2023
Reader’s Corner: Great New Graphic Novels
I covered a quartet of great new graphic novels out this winter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Four graphic novels, among the many fascinating titles hitting stores this winter, delve into a range of subjects: the stark politics and emotional legacy of the Mariel boatlift, a family’s fraught experiences with digital reincarnation, thrilling exploits of hip-hop’s …
December 10, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Just Keep Going
According to Rachel Aviv’s recent portrait of Writer’s Desk favorite Joyce Carol Oates, there really isn’t that much to the author’s fantastic output: …she has not really written that much, when you think about the fact that all it takes to write a hundred books is about two pages a day over the course of …
December 5, 2023
TV Room: Best Shows of 2023
Slant Magazine just published their big year-end TV roundup for 2023. I contributed the intro and wrote about one of my favorite shows from the past year, Fleishman Is in Trouble. Read it here: We’re well into the so-called post-Peak TV era. Tightening budgets and consolidating streaming platforms suggest an uncertain future for the medium. …
December 3, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Get Some Animals
Rita Mae Brown’s career has covered quite the gamut. She has written everything from gay coming-of-age novels (Rubyfruit Jungle) to slasher flick screenplays (Slumber Party Massacre!) and many lucrative mystery novels (the ones that the ingenious cat Sneaky Pie Brown has co-authored). How, NPR once asked the prolific Brown, did she get past writer’s block? …
November 29, 2023
Screening Room: ‘The Taste of Things’
Delectable, delicious, all the adjectives that spring to mind with the great food films, The Taste of Things opens later this year in limited release. My review is at Slant Magazine: Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is almost halfway done before it even hints that there’s something going on within its fin-de-siècle setting besides the …
November 26, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Hunt for Books Which Excite You
You would think that all writers read as much as they can. Not true. Some claim not to have the time. Others don’t want to be unduly influenced by somebody else’s work. Nonsense, says Ed Park, whose raucous new novel Same Bed Different Dreams is just all kinds of amazing. According to Park: I’ll still …
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