Reviews and News:
Colm Tóibín revisits Agamemnon's murder. Joseph Bottum reviews. "In the novelist's mind, Clytemnestra was always a hard-case and a borderline psychopath. But she takes her husband's murder of their daughter—the only good person, really, out of that whole sick crew—as license for all that follows. The Greek sources are less certain of Clytemnestra's motives (and even her means: in some versions, she uses a sacred axe to kill her husband)."
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Thousands of children in Naples are auditioning for a chance to play in an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's first Neapolitan novel. "'Look at my son. He is so beautiful,' said Anna Arrivolo, 43, who grabbed her child's pudgy face and stroked his gelled hair. 'He didn't want to do it. I wanted him to.'"
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Geoff Dyer on the writing life: "It's only while I'm playing tennis, by the ocean, under the cloudless sky, that I feel I'm living the life of the writer to the full. Writers who don't play tennis twice a week are not writers at all, they're just faking it."
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'I misspoke', a weaselly phrase.
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In Case You Missed It:
The art of cheating in baseball: Remembering Red Faber, one of the last great spitballers.
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What's it like to be an obituary columnist?
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Gerald Russello on David Jones's accomplishment: "The language of In Parenthesis is strikingly modern, combining Arthurian legend, chanson de geste like The Song of Roland, with the speech of the Tommies and common slang. But it is also timeless. Through the Welsh soldier Dai Greatcoat we hear echoes of all the soldiers down into the forgotten past. Compared with this great work, the other war poets can seem almost superficial and saccharine."
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Why Czeslaw Milosz still matters.
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Interview: Sam Leith talks to Dominic Dromgoole about performing Hamlet around the world.
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Classic Essay: Gertrude Himmelfarb, " The Trilling Imagination"
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