BOOK BARN

#272.  MORE ON SHAKESPEARE.  Shakespeare is a possession, in almost any sense you want to give the word.  For Brits, he is a national possession: a secondhand bookshop in Stratford I once visited had a large corner display of Shakespeare and a small sign that said proudly: “Local author.”  For theatre people especially, booksellers, professors of literature, he is a professional, a vocational possession.  Stephen Greenblatt has written of “the special delight that Shakespeare

#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,...