Andrea Goldsmith
The Merchant of Venice is a troublesome play. I have seen productions that have played up the comic aspects to an absurd and irritating degree while confining Shylock to the stereotype that bears his name. Some interpretations exploit the play as anti-Semitic propaganda ...
... (read more)Andrea Goldsmith reviews 'Berlin for Jews: A twenty-first-century companion' by Leonard Barkan
The title of this book has a resonance that would not occur, for example, in a text called ‘Paris for Jews’. Most readers will approach the work with understandings and expectations shaped by Hitler and the Holocaust. The title suggests that Berlin is a different city for Jews than for other visitors, and that Jewish Berlin itself is different from ecumenical Be ...
Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...
... (read more)Andrea Goldsmith reviews 'Shylock Is My Name' by Howard Jacobson
Shylock Is My Name is the second novel to appear in Hogarth Press's Shakespeare Project. In this series, eight well-known novelists have each been commissioned to retell ...
... (read more)Andrea Goldsmith reviews 'In Praise of Forgetting: Historical memory and its ironies' by David Rieff
Over the past three decades, and particularly since the prime ministership of John Howard, there has been an extraordinary growth in the number of ...
... (read more)It is a Hollywood staple: C meets T; they fall in love; obstacles stand in their way (a husband, a boyfriend, but most particularly the attitudes of the 1950s); obstacles are mostly overcome, and C and T march happily into the future together. In Todd Haynes's film, Cate Blanchett plays Carol, a ...
... (read more)There are two broad approaches to reading Alberto Manguel’s Curiosity. The first type of reader will study the book – or rather, the text – assiduously connecting the personal narratives that introduce each chapter with the books Manguel references in the more theoretical and discursive aspects that follow. Dante’ ...
The missing novels: our critics nominate some overlooked classics
Andrea Goldsmith reviews 'Susan Sontag' by Daniel Schreiber and 'Susan Sontag' by Jerome Boyd Maunsell
At the age of eight I wanted to be a novelist. By the age of eighteen, having fallen in love with an intellectual, I aspired to be a novelist with sturdy intellectual credentials. There was much work to be done. My beloved set me a course of essential reading, including Susan Sontag’s first two essay collections and her two early novels.
... (read more)Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.
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