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No Place on Earth Follows Ukranian Jews Into the Caves that Shielded them From Nazis
Part The Diary of Anne Frank, part The Swiss Family Robinson, and part The Shawshank Redemption, No Place on Earth, about a Ukrainian Jewish family in WWII who hides from the Nazis by living in caves, has all the elements of a great story: an epic quest (survival), formidable obstacles (Nazis discovering each hiding place), […]
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Reading Around: Absurd Science Fiction in Translation and the Ongoing Triumph of Bach
A laugh-out-loud apocalypse, a daft two-against-the-world love story, and a slashing yet humane science-fiction satire of our faith in corporate designers and the godawful way advertising can cram everything but itself right out of our brains—Andri Snær Magnason’s LoveStar (SevenStories Press, $16.95, 320 pages) is the rare novel that violates a reliable rule-of-thumb: Avoid new […]
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LITERARY LIGHTS
“I don’t want to write any story that I think can be written,” author Nathan Englander recently told Granta magazine. “The challenge and fun of writing stories is engaging with something that seems impossible to execute, so that even I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.” So how did the stories of his […]
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Dishy Talk With Joan and Melissa Rivers!
If the Kardashians were intentionally funny, they’d be Joan and Melissa Rivers, my favorite mother-daughter yenta duo dominating the nation’s cable box. Their reality show, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, just started its second season on WE, and their E! show, Fashion Police, is going to an hour, but amazingly, they found time to […]
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DARK OBSESSION
Instead of the Diary of a Young Girl, playwright Rinne Groff offers a play that might be titled The Memoirs of a Middle-Aged Man. In Compulsion, her ingenious mingling of historical fact and fiction centers on a writer named Sid Silver (based on the real-life figure Meyer Levin). Fixated on Anne Frank’s diary, Silver spends […]
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Anne Frank Appears Off-Broadway
Rinne Groff calls her new play at the Public Theater Compulsion, which is also the name of a 1956 bestseller about the Leopold and Loeb case, by the Chicago writer Meyer Levin (1905–1981). But Levin’s tome only gets passing mention in Groff’s script; its stage and film versions, which bore the same title, get none. […]
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‘Pretty Persuasion’
A high school send-up more gleefully incorrect than Heathers and considerably less articulate than Election, Pretty Persuasion is a hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular. After being fired from her role as Anne Frank in the school play, Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) enlists her friends to corroborate a false sexual assault claim against […]
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Woman on the Wilder Shores
Are we looking at the kitchen table in Anne Frank’s hideout, or the Hollywood studio canteen where Veronica Lake relaxed between takes? In Andrea Kleine’s new Memoir Never Was (secret tales from the annex), which opens Thursday at P.S. 122, the space between the theater’s columns could be either, a 1940s “waiting room” where two […]