About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
A.S. Hamrah
Rave The Nation By rifling through hundreds of films that had wide US releases or made the international-festival rounds during these 11 years—movies that share a distribution schedule, a certain level of prominence, and little else—Hamrah wants to give a composite picture of the political atmosphere in which they all have a share. What they dwell on are particularly charged visions of disaster, carnage, and decay ... The capsule format, to which many of the pieces here commit, can energize ... The capsule form gives and takes. It militates against close dissections of any given film, but offers Hamrah a heightened, compressed vocabulary for describing the impression a movie makes as it spills out ... Another side of Hamrah—more patient, a closer viewer—emerges in The Earth Dies Streaming’s single-subject essays, on directors like Lynch and Herzog or older films like High Noon and The Grapes of Wrath. At his best he has it both ways, putting movies in constellations that suggest unexpected echoes and congruities between them.
Amitava Kumar
Positive Bookforum \"...it’s a frustration in this otherwise rich, searching book that, because its perspective stays so close to his, these women seem more thinly imagined than he. They morph and shrink under his projections: \'I had fallen in love with her, and with her prose. Her perfume and her lips too. No, with her prose and her lipstick\' ... Each time one of them leaves, it deepens the book’s pervasive sense of contact longed for and lost.\
Max Porter
Positive The New Republic Porter is interested in how time seems to drag and speed up to a person under grief or strain ... Grief is the Thing with Feathers is full of moments in which instances of humor surge up from an atmosphere otherwise dominated by stillness and loss.
Anne Boyd Rioux
Positive The New Republic [It was] a dangerous business it is to pit Woolson against James—a quarrel Harper’s started in 1887 and that Rioux misguidedly re-ignites in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. Her comparisons between Woolson and James are this otherwise scrupulous book’s weakest passages.