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When A ‘Windfall’ Isn’t Quite What It Seems

Not even the most ecologically minded are always keen on the prospect of giant wind turbines near their homes. But Meredith, N.Y., welcomed “Big Wind” when it first came whistling through town. That’s what makes Windfall so interesting: The documentary is the story of an education. In some ways, Meredith seems a natural place for [...]

A Study in ‘Black’: By-The-Numbers Horror Still Scares

Candles and cobwebs, cries from the marsh, fog machines on overdrive, a secluded manse stuffed to the rafters with eerily threatening Victoriana, and the Hammer Film Productions logo hovering over the credits — The Woman in Black has been tricked out with everything a cinematic ghost story needed. In 1962. And judging from the shrieks [...]

Flush Poets Society: Donnelly’s ‘Cloud Corporation’ Wins Six-Figure Prize

“Poetry” and “money” are rarely found in the same sentence, unless a practitioner of the former is lamenting his dearth of the latter. Most poets get by on odd jobs, occasional grants, adjunct teaching, snippets of journalism or — in the case of the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch — preserving dead bodies. For Timothy Donnelly, however, [...]

Things Fell Apart: Tony Judt’s ‘Twentieth Century’

“Without history, memory is open to abuse,” writes Tony Judt in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Perhaps more than anything else the late British-American historian wrote, that could have been his credo — his work, especially toward the end of his career, was marked by an almost activist concern for morality, what he called an “explicit [...]

Wislawa Szymborska, Poet Of Gentle Irony, Dies At 88

The surest path to international fame as a poet probably doesn’t involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (pronounced vees-WAH-vah sheem-BOHR-skah), who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died Wednesday, the little things — onions, tarsiers and, yes, sea cucumbers — turned out to be very big [...]

The Producers Behind NBC’s Musical ‘Smash’

Producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan have been making musicals together for almost 20 years. They’re the team behind movie musicals like Hairspray, Chicago and Annie, and the TV musicals Gypsy and The Music Man. Now Meron and Zadan have teamed up once again on the new NBC series Smash, a drama that goes behind [...]

Fired And Foreclosed!: Unemployment Lit

Like many of its readers, the novel has always lived for the weekend; historically, the workaday world of the office and factory has been considered too mundane to be of much interest. Even less sexy to fiction than the topic of work is the topic of losing work. Being fired; losing homes to foreclosure; searching [...]

New In Paperback Jan. 30-Feb. 5

DVD Picks: ‘Wings’

With the silent film The Artist in competition for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, movie critic Bob Mondello has been thinking about the pre-talkie era. As it happens, the last silent film to win for Best Picture has just been released on Blu-ray: the 1927 flying-ace epic Wings. Biplanes dive through clouds high above a [...]

‘Before Watchmen,’ Apocalyptic Tales, And Leaving Well Enough Alone

Comic-book nerds are outraged today. In fairness, comic-book nerds are outraged much of the time — it’s part of their charm. But today, there’s a unifying focus to their teeth-gnashing, as DC Comics has announced plans for seven limited-run titles focusing on characters from its venerated Watchmen series, which ran for 12 issues in 1986 [...]