the new york times – House of SpeakEasy NYC

Post April 21, 2014

Maggie Shipstead’s “Seating Arrangements”

A wedding was always an aphrodisiac, full of temporary pairings driven by vicarious hope. Love was in the air, weak and snappy as static electricity. – Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf, 2012) Maggie Shipstead‘s debut novel, Seating Arrangements (Knopf, 2012), is a witty social comedy with an exploding whale at its heart. Set largely over the course […]

“Hey Joe, where are you going…?”: Lars von Trier’s NYMPH()MANIAC, Vol. II

SPOILERS throughout! Also, well worth seeing Vol. I, which I reviewed here, before seeing Vol. II, which offers no recap for the uninitiated. NYMPH()MANIAC Vol. II is a fist to the throat, a film raw with despair. It picks up where Vol. I left off, with Joe’s anguish over her sudden loss of sexual feeling, and documents the […]

The Luminous Uma Thurman

In 1991 the New York Times marked the “earth-shattering news” that Pauline Kael was retiring by interviewing her. The great iconoclast of film criticism, whose put-downs made her unpopular with publicists but delighted readers of the New Yorker for more than twenty years, nevertheless found much to admire in the latest crop of Hollywood stars. She listed among her […]