rakemag Here’s a pairing with a curious backstory. Galway Kinnell, whose 1980 Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was touring in Northern England when he found himself at a reading by Josephine Dickinson, a deaf Oxford-educated poet, musician, composer, and teacher. More than a decade earlier, she had fallen in … Read more
You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of … Read more
Orson Welles did it, and Laurie Anderson, too. Now local director Jon Ferguson—best known for his 2005 hit, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban—has taken up the challenge of adapting Melville’s epic for the stage. This is an undertaking that, he admits, could elude, haunt, and/or—much as with Captain Ahab—swallow him whole. Ferguson’s project got … Read more
On the occasion of its fifth Walker-commissioned production, Britain’s Improbable Theatre abandons the relative safety of such lavish puppetry spectacles as Shockheaded Peter and The Hanging Man (performed here in 2000 and 2003, respectively) and instead harks back to its roots in scrappy, improvisational object theater. Animo, therefore, is not so much a play as … Read more
In this approximation of a true story, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, the failed writer who conjured up the scam of … if not of the century, at least of the 1970s. Irving claimed to have interviewed Howard Hughes, co-written the recluse’s autobiography, and then walked off with a mint—until the aviator called him on … Read more
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up to give us this two-and-a-half-hour pulp festival featuring two, count ’em, two turgid films shown back to back with faux-vintage trailers in between. The first is Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror, in which biological weapons are unleashed, sending scores of the undead to face … why, a one-legged … Read more
Brendan Flaherty and Sandra Yue recently traveled from Minneapolis to the southwestern province of Sichuan in China. There, they came face to face with this behemoth of a Bodhisattva, the Grand Buddha of Leshan. “This is the world’s largest stone-carved Buddha, at seventy-one-meters high,” said Yue. “It took ninety years to carve him from this … Read more
Brian Lambert may have left key questions unasked in an investigative report into the writings of Katherine Kersten [“The One-Woman Solution,” February]. I would like to know if Kersten’s hiring and the pulling of advertising revenue to the Tribune from TCF Bank were connected. I would hope that a reporter with Lambert’s chops would be … Read more
I really liked your article on the murders in Minneapolis 2006 [“Murder By Numbers,” March]. It brought tears to my eyes—a couple of those people I knew personally, and it took me back to July 16, 2004, when my youngest brother was murdered on those same Minneapolis streets! I am angry that the Minneapolis Police … Read more
In your article about murder in Minneapolis, in the section with details of the crimes, I noticed that three people were arrested, for three different murders, who all had the last name “Bobo.” How about an investigative article, in the future, of the Bobo family, and their background? Are they from Minneapolis originally, or did … Read more