Author: sbergman

We tend to take Shakespeare at face value, probably just because the Bard’s work is so familiar. But a close look at, say, King Lear offers plenty of reminders that this is not an easy play to like at first reading. “Some were frustrated by its inconsistencies and contradictions… The biggest complaints, though, are stirred by the almost sadistic cruelty that pervades the text: It’s not an easy play to stomach.”

“By and large, literary writers working for Hollywood have not had great luck at it… Until Tom Perrotta came along, that is. Perrotta, whose novels Election and Little Children were made into acclaimed films by Alexander Payne and Todd Field, respectively, is now most of the way through adapting his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher… It’s a sign of the excitement over Perrotta’s work that the screenplay was almost done before the novel.”

The revelation by author JK Rowling that the wizard Dumbledore is gay has journalists (and, it should be said, some parents and activists groups) in a tizzy. But Rowling’s young readers seem to have taken the news in stride. Rowling herself described the revelation of Dumbledore’s sexuality as “freeing.” “He’s my character,” she asserted. “I have the right to know what I know about him and say what I say about him.”

“Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal… Now this system is under threat from, of all people, the Swiss. Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.”