Light and Dark AT THE MOST RECENT CEREMONIAI, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the finest poets of his generation, a poet who has been praised for his dark and sardonic view of the world, as well as for...

DANCE Dance in Brooklyn at Solstice William Forsythe's Enemy in the Figure is just what most fans expect from him. A rippled freestanding wall obstructs part of BAM's stage. Thom Willems's cataclysmic score crashes around Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt performers. Extremes of dark...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri...

Breathe easy: I think it’s safe to say without much exaggeration (and only an understandable modicum of self-congratulation) that The Observer has saved Laura. Saved the last, incomplete, unseen Vladimir Nabokov manuscript from a threat of destruction. In a convoluted way, my plea to...

[Creatures of Light and Darkness] is another of Zelazny's velvet fabrics with a warp of Christian, Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths spun into one thread and a weft of macabre fantasy about an order of existence which superposes and controls our own universe. The author manipulates the fantasy of the struggle for power between cruel and vindictive entities of the superposing existence around distortions of the various myths. He thus reveals the starkness of essential life and death. The creatures of th...

Lo and on the "Thousandyear Eve," Anubis, Lord of the House of the Dead, gave his faithful servant the name of Wakim and sent him on a mission to the Midway worlds to search out and destroy "the Prince Who Was a Thousand" [in Creatures of Light and Darkness]. But Wakim was deceived for "the Prince Who Was a Thousand" was both his son and his father …? It's psychedelic myth … chasing phantoms across eternal chasms … a very heady head trip ...