No one knows as yet who B. Traven really was. Without revealing his identity, he became a best-selling author in the German-speaking countries of Europe with his first novel, Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship) in 1926. Although he always cla...

SOURCE: “The Languages of Science Fiction: Samuel Delany's Babel-17,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 5-17. In the following essay, Malmgren examines the function of language in Babel-17, which he views as the novel'...

SOURCE: "A Concert Stage Too Small for Morality and Art," in Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1996, p. 1. In the following review, Swed assesses the viability of composer Shostakovich's symphonic rendition of Babi Yar, focusing on the musical...

SOURCE: Macnab, Geoffrey. Review of The Baby of Mâcon, by Peter Greenaway. Sight and Sound 3, no. 9 (September 1993): 41. In the following negative review, Macnab argues that the acting and the technological innovations in The Baby of Mâc...

In life, one must realize that it is impossible to be perfect and so there are always going to be things that one will regret. Modernist author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his short story, "Babylon Revisited", tells the story of a man who has ...

SOURCE: Montrose, David. “Waiting for the Future.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4321 (24 January 1986): 82. In the following mixed review, Montrose provides a stylistic overview of the stories in Tobias Wolff's Back in the World. The ...

Po Chü-i (772-846) was a Chinese poet best known for his ballads and satirical poems. He held the view that good poetry should be readily understood by the common people and exemplified it in poems noted for simple diction, natural st...

After the manifold splendours of Balthazar, Mouchette seems an altogether thinner experience, exquisite but frail, as though Bresson this time had chosen to tell only the story of Marie without the counterpoint of Balthazar. Unlike the earl...

Woody Allen is probably the best comic talent working in American movies today, but also about the most erratic…. [Bananas] has some ideas that are so bad we may laugh simply because he's really going through with them…. Much of his hum...

SOURCE: Cooke, Judy. “Roast Cat.” New Statesman 100, no. 2583 (19 September 1980): 23. In the following excerpt, Cooke praises The Crow Eaters as an “excellent” and enjoyable novel. Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters is an excellent nov...

A cultural analyst and political activist, Barbara Ehrenreich is arguably one of the most astute, acerbic and witty critics in the United States. She belongs to the generation of feminists who came to maturity in the 1960s as student dissi...

Long active on the New York art scene (she helped edit Art News from 1951 to 1954), Barbara Guest is "commonly considered the finest fruit of the New York school of poets," according to critic Alicia Ostriker, although one of its supposed ...

Barbara Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, the elder daughter of Frederic Crampton and Irene Thomas Pym. She was educated at a private school in Liverpool and at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, where she studied English literature and took...

Through the 1970s and 1980s there were many police shows on television. Most were action shows full of car chases and shootouts, or shows dealing with the serious dramas of contemporary society. Barney Miller was different. From 1975 to 19...

SOURCE: Allen, Bruce. “Nam Book Year's Best.” Christian Science Monitor (7 June 1985): B7. In the following review, Allen compliments The Barracks Thief for its depth and verisimilitude. This remarkable short novel [The Barracks Thief],...

SOURCE: “Narrative and Discourse in Kubrick's Modern Tragedy,” in The English Novel and the Movies, edited by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, Frederick Ungar Publishing, pp. 95-107. In the following essay, Klein elucidates the unique ...

Herman Melville's short story Bartleby the Scrivener, was written for people used to conforming to others opinions to push the idea of individual thought and actions as opposed to compliance and to show the value of appreciation. When Bar...

SOURCE: "What's the Goopus?" in American Film, Vol. 16, August, 1991, pp. 30-32, 46. In the following essay, Robertson describes a day in the shooting of Barton Fink. Listlessly scratching his facial stubble, Ethan Coen gazes thoughtfully o...

The work of Basil Bunting refutes the longheld contention that modernism is an exclusively American phenomenon which began on British soil. Integrally connected with Ezra Pound, this movement in poetry began in England in 1908. Not only do...

SOURCE: A review of The Basketball Diaries, in American Book Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, February, 1980, p. 9. In the following review, James lauds The Basketball Diaries. The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll is a literary miracle; a descriptio...

I don't know that ["Battle Cry"] does anything to advance American literature, but it makes the Marines understandable. The first few hundred pages, to my mind the best part of the book, are perhaps the most explicit survey of the training ...

SOURCE: Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949, pp. 115-20, 163-66. In the following essay, Eisenstein discusses Battleship Potemkin. To return anew to the question of purity of...

The Meaning of Birds Lions, tigers, and bears are all animals used to symbolize humans and their mannerisms. Birds can also be used to relate to humans, as they seem to possess many of the same characteristics as humans do. A woodpecker'...

In the 1960s a new band known as the Beatles burst on the pop music scene and changed it forever. Band members included George Harrison (born 1943), John Lennon (1940-1980), Paul McCartney (born 1942), and Ringo Starr (born 1940). With the...

Define a beautiful woman. What kinds of adjectives come to mind? Do her inner qualities make her beautiful as well? What does "beauty is only skin deep" really mean? I always thought what made a person truly and genuinely beautiful, is...