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Murder, sex, dystopia and madness earned spots on the diverse longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize. The annual award, which honors the year’s best English-language novel published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, announced the 13 authors in the running on July 24. British author and playwright Deborah Levy is nominated for her book “The…
Though we will likely never be able to prove definitively that “Star Wars” inspired the attacks of September 11, it seems reasonable to assume that they did not. This is an assumption we should reexamine, according to “The Handmaiden’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood, who said in an interview with Variety that the “idea” for 9/11…
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
Before Drake was topping the charts and sweeping the Billboard awards, he was best known for wheeling himself ‘round town as a handicapped high school student on Canada’s absolute best teen drama television series, “Degrassi”. And now, Drake’s Canadian compatriot, Margaret Atwood, is suggesting the rapper return to acting in the Hulu original series based…
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
As we saw with the Batsheva Dance Company in 2009 and the Jerusalem Quartet in March, when it comes to Israel, even the most straightforward arts organizations have the potential to become the subjects of political controversy. The most recent flare-up centered around Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who accepted the Dan David Prize for literature…
