BOOK BARN

#271: BLESSING THE TELLERS OF TALES.  Perhaps no contemporary writer has been more committed and persuasive—both in his own work and in his critical writing—about the power and necessity of telling stories than Philip Pullman, most famously the author of His Dark Materials . It was the common theme of his collection Dæmon Voices , with essays ranging from Kleist and Dickens and Milton and Tove Jansson and Arthur Ransome to more formal pieces on narrative and storytelling (as

#270: THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD.  IN 2003, HBO filmed and aired a six-part miniseries of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America .  The play,...

#269: TAOISM FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS.  Taoism is, with Confucianism, one of the two chief indigenous Chinese systems of thought, that have shaped their culture, world view, and history.  By the time its principal texts were composed, around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Taoism was already of great antiquity, and its influence has continued, reluctantly tolerated by China’s Communist political leaders, who seem to have figured they have to make the best of something they