Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 41
August 20, 2021
Literary Birthday: Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret (born today in 1967) made his name publishing stories of modern Israeli life that were riddled with black humor and painful absurdities. In the title story of Keret’s collection Fly Already, a father is on his way to play ball with his son in the park when he spots a man who looks …
August 16, 2021
Reader’s Corner: ‘The Passenger’
Ulrich Boschwitz first published his autobiographical novel The Passenger in 1939, basing its tale of a hapless German Jewish businessman running for his life on his own family’s refugee existence. My review of the new translation ran in Rain Taxi Review of Books: Silbermann is on the run in a country crawling with Gestapo, brownshirts, …
August 15, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Frame Your Story
Many episodes of Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast explore the craft of comedy in very specific ways that may or may not have relevance to writers working in other fields. However, creativity is creativity and a comic who cannot write is a comic who with a very short career arc. On episode 50, where …
August 9, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Ema’
My review of Ema, opening this week in limited release, is at PopMatters: A burning, jolting firecracker of a film, Pablo Larraín’s Ema is filled with a surplus of passion that could surprise fans of the filmmaker’s more bottled-up work like Jackie (2016) and Neruda (2016). It does, however, share those films’ hypnotic and sinuous flow of sight and sound, delivered here …
August 8, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Wait for the Words to Reveal Themselves
Leonard Cohen published his first poetry in 1954, later moving on to novels and then the songs that made him famous, never quite putting down that pen until his death in 2016. Discussing an album he released in 2014, Cohen talked about the importance of not giving up on the work. He mentioned working on …
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August 5, 2021
Screening Room: ‘All the Streets are Silent’
Jeremy Elkin’s new documentary, All the Streets are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997) is playing now in limited release. My review is at PopMatters: At the risk of stoking the embers of East and West Coast rivalry, it seems self-evident that when it came to incubating subcultures in the late 20th …
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August 1, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Pull a Gatsby
Megan Abbott, whose newest novel The Turnout is out this month, had some good advice for how to find the right narrative perspective for your book: I’ve always been interested in the “Gatsby structure,” which is when you don’t tell the story from the point of view of the most interesting character, though they can …
July 30, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Stillwater’
The new movie from Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) takes some inspiration from the Amanda Knox case but goes in different directions, some interesting, others less so. Stillwater is playing in wide theaters-only release now. My review is at PopMatters: Oil field roughneck Bill (Matt Damon) relocates from the hardscrabble flatlands of Oklahoma to the graffiti-splattered urban …
July 29, 2021
Literary Birthday: Chester Himes
Raised in Missouri, Chester Himes (born today in 1909) began his writing career in an unlikely place. While attending Ohio State University, he started walking on the wild side. He was sent to prison for robbery at the age of 19. Buying a typewriter in part with his gambling winnings, he began writing stories from …
July 25, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Enemies of the State’
Enemies of the State opens in limited release this Friday. My review is at Slant: Sonia Kennebeck’s murky, labyrinthine documentary would seem to be another entry in the tradition of heroic whistleblower narratives popularized by filmmakers like Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) in the early 2010s. Its story is centered around Matt DeHart, a former Indiana Air National …
