THEATER: The Momentum by Aaron Riccio

Photo/Max RubyThere's something inherently appalling about self-help seminars: the idea of a super-serious guru getting up on a stage and telling you that they can radically Change Your Life…

SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 5:14pm on January 27, 2011☆⚑

THEATER: Room 17B by Aaron Riccio

Photo/Jim MooreIn 2008, the troupe Parallel Exit was nominated for the Drama Desk's "Unique Theatrical Experience" award. Their latest show, Room 17B, suffers in comparison: not only is a gr…

SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 4:23am on January 26, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Dacia Maraini's "Hunger" by Aaron Riccio

Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 63.[Translated by Will Schutt as part of the FOCUS: Italy series.]The child opens her eyes and di…

SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 3:40am on January 26, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Antonio Tabbuchi's "The Dead at the Table" by Aaron Riccio

Originally published in A Public Space, No. 6, 2008. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 33.[Translated by Will Schutt as part of the FOCUS: Italy series.]Ah, the Wall! How he missed the…

SOURCE: That Sounds Cool at 4:20pm on January 25, 2011☆⚑

RELEASE: Kinderspiel (and Stolen Kiss) by Aaron Riccio

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 2:45am on January 25, 2011☆⚑

RELEASE: Dainty Cadaver by Aaron Riccio

When 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 2:36am on January 25, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Preeta Samarasan's "Birch Memorial" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:25pm on January 24, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Gary Amdahl's "The Cold, Cold Water" by Aaron Riccio

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 4:29pm on January 23, 2011☆⚑

THEATER: Flipzoids by Aaron Riccio

Photo/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 12:15am on January 23, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Erri de Luca's "An Hour of Hate" by Aaron Riccio

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 10:25pm on January 22, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Hisham Matar's "Naima" by Aaron Riccio

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 5:33pm on January 21, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Sana Krasikov's "Debt" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:25pm on January 20, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Mario Bellatin's "Lessons for a Dead Hare" by Aaron Riccio

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 5:31pm on January 19, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Jesmyn Ward's "Cattle Haul" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:59pm on January 18, 2011☆⚑

THEATER: Honey Brown Eyes by Aaron Riccio

Dragan (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 4:33pm on January 18, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Wells Tower's "Door In Your Eye" by Aaron Riccio

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 5:23pm on January 17, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: James Lasdun's "The Old Man" by Aaron Riccio

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 3:20pm on January 16, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Amos Oz's "The King of Norway" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:04pm on January 15, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: John Edgar Wideman's "Always Raining Somewhere, Said Jim Johnson" by Aaron Riccio

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 4:52pm on January 14, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Ernst Weiss's "The Rat Ship" by Aaron Riccio

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 2:50pm on January 13, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Valery Bryusov's "The Republic of the Southern Cross" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:07pm on January 12, 2011☆⚑

THEATER: Blood from a Stone by Aaron Riccio

Photo/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 7:23pm on January 12, 2011☆⚑

THEATER: Kim Noble Will Die by Aaron Riccio

Whether 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 5:39pm on January 12, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Owen Marshall's "The Frozen Continents" by Aaron Riccio

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 11:44pm on January 11, 2011☆⚑

Short-a-Day: Helen Schulman's "I Am Seventy-Five" by Aaron Riccio

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 5:52pm on January 10, 2011☆⚑