The bestselling writer, known as Japan’s enfant terrible, explored the dark underbelly of Japanese society in more than 40 works of subversive fiction including Audition, later made into a landmark indie horror movie
There’s always been some kind of allure of reading the classics. Take for instance Rory Gilmore curled up with the book or Maeve Wiley casually dropping sharp references to Virginia Woolf. They inspired the whole Lit Girl aesthetic, attracting viewers by their intellect, depth, and wit.
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| Art Spielgelman |
Iker Seisdedos
February 15, 2022
Art Spiegelman, 73, describes himself as a “First Amendment fundamentalist,” alluding to freedom of expression and religion. “Just like those religious fundamentalists in Tennessee.” The famous cartoonist is talking about members of a local school board in McMinn County, Tennessee who recently decided to remove his masterpiece, Maus, from the middle school curriculum. The acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust is based on the memories of Spiegelman’s father, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The real estate world is making itself at home in the metaverse, that digital kingdom in which thousands of intangible properties are sold for millions of dollars every day, and where someone can also become the owner of a stunning mansion for no more than $2,400 – provided you can pay in the cryptocurrency the platform requires.
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| Charlize Theron |
Five years after the first film came out, a misshapen action fantasy follow-up arrives with a baffling cliffhanger ending
Even with our thick-of-Covid desperation for anything that felt big at a time when life felt too small, there was more to The Old Guard than the average churned out Netflix mockbuster. Released in the hell of July 2020, it came with the requisite boxes ticked (big star, international locations, franchisable setup) but felt closer to the real thing than most, proving to be a hit for those eager for escapism, scoring one of the streamer’s biggest launches to date.
After seeing Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of “Little Women” at the start of the year, I was totally captivated by the heart-warming story.
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| Exposed loneliness … Moss's protagonist is sent to sleep in the attic, 'vulnerable as a wounded animal'. Illustration: Clifford Harper for the Guardia |
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| Casa Malaparte, designed by Adalberto Libera in the 1930s for Curzio Malaparte, writer and architect manqué |
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| Inside story … detail from Richard Hamilton's collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? showing at the Tate Modern retrospective Feb-May 2014. Photograph: Tate Images |
The Great Indoors explores changes in domestic life over the last hundred years or so, and it does so room by room (starting in the hallway and ending in the attic). I was interested in how these "living" rooms have been used, what they have been filled with and what they felt like across the 20th century and into the 21st.
The trials of immortality … sketch of Circe by John William Waterhouse.
In ancient myth – and novels by authors from Neil Gaiman to Toni Morrison – these ambiguous figures are sometimes repressive, sometimes inspiring
What springs to mind when you think of the word “goddess”? Divine feminine energy? Mother Earth? Ancient Greek women wafting around in white dresses causing mischief? “Domestic goddesses” or “sex goddesses”? Or even Anastasia Steele’s exuberant “inner goddess” who spends a lot of Fifty Shades of Grey salsa-ing and pole-vaulting in excitement about her romantic escapades? (Each to her own.)
Commanding presence … God, as depicted on the dome fresco by Johann Michael Rottmayr at Karlskirche (St. Charles’s Church) in Vienna. Photograph: Fred de Noyelle
He doesn’t appear very often in fiction, but in these books – by authors ranging from Fyodor Dostoevsky to John Updike – his impact is almighty
Neil Griffiths
Wednesday 6 December 2017
God seldom features in fiction. Having been dispensed with by Enlightenment philosophes around the time the first novels were emerging, he must have seemed irrelevant. The novel was new and God was old. Even clergy, who were facing an existential crisis of great literary potential, seemed infra dig to most novelists. There were new professions to explore: revolutionary, businessman, detective.
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| Paul Bowles |
Ferdinanda Florence
While I love art that is epic, complex, colourful, of mythic proportions and multi-layered, there’s a side of me that is very much into creative expressions that are stripped down and unassuming.
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| PAUL BOWLES Painting by Annette Solyst |
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| Andrea Camilleri |
VAMPIRE
by Jan Neruda
The excursion steamer brought us from Constantinople to the shore of the island of Prinkipo and we disembarked. The number of passengers was not large. There was one Polish family, a father, a mother, a daughter and her bridegroom, and then we two. Oh, yes, I must not forget that when we were already on the wooden bridge which crosses the Golden Horn to Constantinople, a Greek, a rather youthful man, joined us. He was probably an artist, judging by the portfolio he carried under his arm. Long black locks floated to his shoulders, his face was pale, and his black eyes were deeply set in their sockets. From the first moment he interested me, especially for his obligingness and for his knowledge of local conditions. But he talked too much, and I then turned away from him.
