446 stories by "George Hunka"
One of the most often quoted excerpts from his Paris Review interview is William Gaddis’ brief dismissal of his recent contemporaries as influences on his work. “Speaking of infl…
Let’s explode one myth right at the outset — that The Recognitions and the other four novels of William Gaddis are difficult (whatever that could possibly mean these days). It is…
The most gullible customer a salesman can ever encounter is another salesman. It is a very small step from believing your own outlandish exaggerations to believing those of others.
Apropos of my post late last week about the publication of William Gaddis’ letters, I point to a short essay by the novelist’s biographer Joseph Tabbi which appeared on the blog …
Now available for pre-order from amazon.com, The Letters of William Gaddis will be published on 7 March 2013 by the Dalkey Archive Press. Edited by Steven Moore and with an afterword by Sara…
At the moment, David Mamet has two plays in previews on Broadway — his contemporary classic Glengarry Glen Ross (the original 11 November opening has been pushed back to 8 December) an…
Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 181 pages; 27 illustrations. Available from amazon.com. It’s a surprise to find a life of the Sage of Frankfurt, a …
Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen and Harold Pinter’s final play Celebration are both set in restaurants — there must be something about taking meals in public that has the …
My post on Saturday regarding Walter Kirn’s parody of book reviews in yesterday’s New York Times generated an unusual amount of traffic. I am able to track what kinds of Google s…
I must share this piece by Walter Kirn which appears in tomorrow’s New York Times book section: a review of Samson Graham-Muñoz’s second novel, The String Theory Quartet. Of t…
Enthusiasts of the work of Samuel Beckett will note the recent debut of the new Beckett Circle Web site. Described as the “official Web site of the Samuel Beckett Society,” the o…
In a new interview published at The White Review, philosopher Simon Critchley engages in an interesting discussion of tragedy and the modern world. His book on tragedy, Stay, Illusion! The H…
The only moment that my daughters (and their parents) were genuinely frightened was during the start of the storm on Monday night. After the sun went down and the wind and rain rose, at abou…
(Continued from “The Bomb in the Mind.”) The Ground Zero of the World Trade Center attack shares a designation with the Ground Zero of the Hiroshima bomb — a designation wh…
Unlike a recent commenter on this blog, I still believe in the necessity for the purpose-built structure for theatre, the stage; I even believe in the ability of the single-set, small-cast p…
All four of my posts on the recent In the Intersection report about new American plays — all 4,100 bloody words of the thing — can now be found on a single page here (in reverse …
Playwrights finally had their say at the end of the first day of the In the Intersection conference. Charles Randolph-Wright, Amy Freed, and Karen ZacarÃas, all current residents at the A…
Four years ago on this date my father died; in his memory I repost below a meditation on this written in August 2010 and which appears as the final chapter of Word Made Flesh under the title…
At the beginning of day two — and the beginning of act two — of the In the Crossroads conference, critic and former ART artistic director Robert Brustein looked around the comfor…
The two contending main characters in In the Intersection — the non-profit theatre and the commercial theatre — want different things, as in any play; the conflict lies in how th…
To discuss what American drama has become in the years after 9/11, one must examine how American theatres are run in the years after 9/11 — it goes straight to the question of what kin…
Australian and German theatres are not having the best of luck with American playwrights this week — a theme that takes up the first two items of this week’s theatre news roundup…
The “doomsday clock” was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organization of University of Chicago scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project that …
In an essay entitled “Sound and Fury” in the 27 May issue of the Economist, Christopher Shinn writes about the role of madness in artistic creation: When I write a play, I try to…
The atomic and hydrogen bombs were not ultimately the inventions of Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, the Manhattan Project, or even the Second World War itself. As Jonathan Schell notes in th…
