BOOK BARN

#260.  MAGIC.   Is there any noise anywhere in the world, any sounds and sweet airs so lyric-glorious, as those of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte--The Magic Flute ?  In Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a fad going for “magic” operas, so Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, raided fairy tales, Egyptian mythology, and a frame of Masonic numerology and moral adages to come up with the opera’s moonstruck and kitchen-sink storyline.  Richard Wagner compl

#259.  WHEN WE LEFT IT WAS STILL LIGHT.  In 2021, Louise Glück published Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), a...

8: HAVING IT OUT WITH HOPKINS.  At the age of 21 and after a childhood much given to asceticism, Gerard Manley Hopkins became a...