Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Has it been over three years since Kinderspiel last trod the boards? Apparently so; my old review can be found here, but information about the new production, which will be done in repertoir…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:45AMWhen I was in college, I used to play Exquisite Corpse, that game where you continue a piece of art based only on seeing what the person immediately before you has created. When applied to t…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:36AMMonday, January 24, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 100.Hot-hot, sweet-sweet. That's all they knew. Lawyer Sivalingam whose fat wife lay dying--that…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:25PMSunday, January 23, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 64.When he awoke, he turned his head away from the wall and looked at the long rectangle of pale …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:29PMPhoto/Web BegoleA "flip," according to Redford (Carlo Alban), is a derogatory term for Filipino immigrants like him. To this particular teenager, a rust-blond dye job, it's just another symp…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 12:15AMSaturday, January 22, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 44.[Translated by Simon Nightingale as part of the FOCUS: Italy series.]"For a good many years la…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 10:25PMFriday, January 21, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 85.The narrator of this story, Nuri, is writing mainly from an eight-year-old's perspective, ta…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:33PMThursday, January 20, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 66.Krasikov's one of those writers who knows her characters so well that it takes us a moment to …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:25PMWednesday, January 19, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 1.[Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Alarcon]Bellatin's story begins with the promise of some…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:31PMTuesday, January 18, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 90.An ambitious and tragic slice-of-life debut from Ms. Ward, who uses the in media res action of…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:59PMDragan (Edoardo Ballerini) a Serbian soldier, trains an automatic rifle on Alma (Sue Cremin), a Bosnian Muslim; for the duration of this first scene, he will terrorize her, as if by rote, sh…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:33PMMonday, January 17, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 1.Some people might like to wonder what the story they've just read was all about; I don't. "The …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:23PMSunday, January 16, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 69.A very spare and simple story in which Conrad, a loan manager, bonds with two former Czechoslo…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:20PMSaturday, January 15, 2011
Originally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 17, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 3.[Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.]Luna said, "Why do you take all the sorrow …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:04PMFriday, January 14, 2011
Originally published in Harper's, February 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 27.This simple story lacks enough ambition to justify Wideman's writerly tricks; at heart, it's about…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 04:52PMThursday, January 13, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 5, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 63.[Part of a longer novel, Georg Letham (1931); translated from the German by Joel Rotenburg.]Un…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 02:50PMWednesday, January 12, 2011
Republished (from Russia, 1905) in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 83.[Part of the FOCUS: Antarctica series.] An entertaining, newspaper-like account of …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:07PMPhoto/Monique CarboniApparently director Scott Elliott and the New Group take their idioms very seriously: as the title of Tommy Nohilly's Blood from a Stone suggests, they have taken a flin…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 07:23PMWhether or not it's true that Kim Noble is suicidal, has been in and out of psychiatric care, and was almost banned from entering the US with his one-man show Kim Noble Will Die because of t…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:39PMTuesday, January 11, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 1.[Part of the FOCUS: Antarctica series.] I found it an odd sensation at first; standing waist de…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:44PMMonday, January 10, 2011
Originally published in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 96.So much for discovering the joys of homoeroticism today. She was alive and alone with a mess t…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:52PMSunday, January 9, 2011
[Part of the COIL Festival]Actors have nothing to fear from Annie Dorsen's "ipad-de-deus," Hello Hi There, which has two laptop-based chatter bots attempting to talk about the famous 1971 …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 09:44PMOriginally published in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 1.You never know what you're going to get with Vollman, but it's probably going to be overwritten…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 09:44PMSaturday, January 8, 2011
Photo/Nancy Geeroms"Manipulation is acting in a nutshell," says Zachary Oberzan, speaking as John Claude van Damme, reciting the words of his brother Gator Oberzan, but Your brother. Remem…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:49PMOriginally published in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 80.Even though his story's set toward the start of the Vietnam War, Shepard so accurately describ…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:00AMFriday, January 7, 2011
Photo/Julian Oppenheim[Part of the Under the Radar Festival]In "Bull," the second novella of Will Self's 1993 book, "Cock and Bull," a large, homosexual, heavyset young man wakes up to find …
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 11:47PMPhoto/Valentina Newman[Part of the Under the Radar Festival]Considering how absurdly arbitrary the reasons for getting into a war usually are in the first place, it makes sense that Guillerm…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:56PMPhoto/Saddi Khali[Part of the Under the Radar Festival]"You have to know how other people live," posits Universes, the company behind Ameriville, shortly before they launch into a freewheeli…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 05:12PMIs the new boxing drama from FX a knockout or a stretched-out derivative of The Fighter and Rocky Balboa? Could be both, might be neither; find out more by reading my review for Slant Magazi…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:14PMPhoto/BerlinBerlin[Part of the Under the Radar Festival]Even though the town of Bonanza, Colorado, has only seven full-time residents, it's a little naive of company Berlin (Bart Baele, Yves…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 03:09PMOriginally published in A Public Space, No. 4. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 18.Being both a cultural tale about the division between the Chinese and the Uyghurs and a generational…
SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 01:52AM 
