Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin Perhaps no other author has painted a whole portrait of a young man as James Baldwin has in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin begins and ends the story with John Grimes, the stepson of a violently abusive Baptist preacher, on the day of his […]
Category: Monthly Recs
Anatomy of a Fall dir. Justine Triet The first half of Anatomy of a Fall, the recent film from French writer and director Justine Triet, tells you many times over what it will not do. When the central character (and suspect) Sandra tells her lawyer Vincent that she is innocent, he says (if a little […]
“Change” by Big Thief I listened to the album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief for the first time earlier this month and its first track, “Change,” just hit the hardest for me. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is beautiful–lingering and haunting–as she contemplates what change looks like at different levels and […]
The Devil’s Plan, Netflix My favorite game show ever–and what I believe to be the best reality TV show ever made–is The Genius, a South Korean show that aired for four seasons in 2013-2015. The Devil’s Plan, a 2023 Netflix show, was created by the same showrunner and acts as the unofficial sequel and inheritor […]
Speed (1994) dir. Jan de Bont I cannot talk about Speed without talking about Los Angeles. On screen LA is represented frequently but not accurately—it is often the site of the apocalyptic, the superficial and fake, or it acts as a synecdoche for the Hollywood industry. I am not a stickler for realism in my […]
Without consulting each other, our authors watched a different Wong Kar-wai film and then chose it as their recommendations. What can we say? We were in that romantic August mood. In the Mood for Love (2000) written & directed by Wong Kar-wai This movie has been on a to-watch list for a while, and it […]
EVERGREEN by PVRIS It’s hard to determine which PVRIS single is the best forerunner to their new album EVERGREEN. Was it “Monster,” which uses similar distorted guitars and vocals? Was it “My Way,” the lyrics and title of which make clear the manner frontwoman Lynn Gunn has chosen for her sound: “My my my way […]
Game Changer via Dropout The comfort of the game show is that you have the same set-up every time. Perhaps, like your classic game shows, you keep spinning the wheel and asking for vowels. Or perhaps the challenge changes every episode, but they’re all still based in physicality or strategy, all working within the same […]
The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner My April recommendation is the continuation of last month’s. I read the second book in the Queen’s Thief series, The Queen of Attolia. This book, just like the first, had me enthralled by storytelling, specifically the way that the author masterfully conceals information from the reader. I […]
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte No matter how well-established and iconic a piece of literature is, nothing compares to reading it for yourself. In the case of Wuthering Heights—yes, the classic by Emily Bronte—all I knew were a few of the romantic lines, which deeply unprepared me to the utter insanity of this novel. Don’t […]
