Hudson Review, The

Wilkin shares how she and her husband enjoyed the beauty of Istanbul, Turkey. She relates that they were fascinated by the multiplicity of the ancient, layered city, not only literally--the superb mosaic from the Byzantine Great Palace underneath the former stables of the Blue Mosque, now a rather uspcale bazaar, or the great underground cistern built by Justinian with columns taken from Roman sites.

Death and Immortality

Balee revews The Infinities by John Banville.

Five New Voices

Blake reviews several books namely Burn Lake by Carrie Fountain, How to Catch a Falling Knife by Daniel Johnson, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague, Medicine Show by Tom Yuill, and Beautiful in the Mouth by Keetje Kuipers.

From Theater to Opera: Directors Crossing Over

Countless theater directors have jumped into opera in recent years and the phenomenon has given rise to an ahistorical notion that opera used to be untheatrical until the recent past when companies started bringing in theater talent to redress the balance. Neher discusses directorial crossover from theater to opera.

A poem is presented.

A poem is presented.

A poem is presented.

A poem is presented.

Pritchard reviews PREFACES TO SHAKESPEARE by Tony Tanner.

Songbirds

Bawer reviews A FINE ROMANCE: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman.

The Edinburgh Festival

The best place for recharging one's theatrical batteries is in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival, held annually in late summer. The Edinburgh International Festival was founded in 1947, in an attempt to revive European culture in the wake of World War II. It is easily the biggest theatrical event in the world, with literally thousands of shows; even if they all kept running indefinitely, instead of only a few times, it would take nearly four years to see them-and in the meantime a new festiv...

The Isolated Protagonist: Three Novels by Orhan Pamuk, Jenny Mcphee, and Laura Stevenson

Grosholz reviews The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and translated by Maureen Freely, A Man of No Moon by Jenny McPhee, and Return in Kind by Laura C. Stevenson.

The Tale of Genji As a Modern Novel

The Tale of Genji is so vast and old and subtle and strange and marvelous that one is tempted to think of it as a kind of phenomenon, something to be experienced and then disregarded, like the Northern Lights. This long work of prose fiction, written a thousand years ago by a noblewoman at the imperial court of Heian, Japan, comes to English speaking readers wrapped in the silky extraneousness of the exotic. Here, Phillips dissects The Tale of Genji as a modern novel and discusses how its aut...

Transport

A poem is presented.

Virginia Woolf-'Death Is the Enemy'

Brombert examines Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Violence lurks beneath the delicate texture and lyrical strains of Woolf's poetic prose. The original idea of her most famous novel, To the Lighthouse, has at its center an image of her father sitting in a boat reciting from a poem about solitary death. Death early in her life became an obsession. Writing is for her a struggle against death, an act of defiance, a way of protecting her sanity.

Visitors

A short story is presented.