Entries from October 2009

Oct. 16, 2009

“City of Thieves”

David Benioff’s World War II adventure novel “City of Thieves” is a great speed-read. Fast, smart, cinematic.

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Oct. 15, 2009

How to Make a Movie About a Writer

Yesterday I saw Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star,” about the doomed romance between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and I liked it very much. How could I not like it? The romantic hero is a writer. You don’t see that very often. Writers make bad film protagonists because the real work of writing [...]

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Oct. 14, 2009

Inside “The Strangler”: Angiulo, Barboza and fictionalizing the Mob

Two notorious Boston crime figures, Gerry Angiulo and Joe Barboza, are reanimated in The Strangler.

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Oct. 9, 2009

Updated Books Section

I haven’t posted much this week but I have been hard at work on the blog. If you click the Books button above, you will see a redesigned section devoted to my novels. The sub-sections for Mission Flats and The Strangler in particular are all new. I will keep updating these Books pages for visitors [...]

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Oct. 4, 2009

Vermeer

The effort to rival his best works, which was out of the question for anyone else, must have tormented Vermeer, whose self-generated standards demanded a labor-intensiveness scarcely convenient for a father of eleven, working in the middling genre of domestic interiors. Most of his Dutch peers averaged fifty or so pictures a year; Vermeer clocked [...]

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