adaptation | The Smart Set

Brilliant Zingers and Vodka Stingers

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

During the second episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — producer Ryan Murphy’s streaming series based on author Truman Capote’s lived-in-and-laughed-over 1960s among Manhattan’s “ladies who lunch” — titular actor Tom Hollander truly has his way with spite. Leaning with persnickety dread into a line that all but explains the raison d’etre of biting […]

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Remixing Watchmen

Robert Joseph — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 12:30:35 +0000

The fourth episode of Damon Lindelof’s HBO series Watchmen, “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,” opens with a song I never heard before, and closes with a recording of a song I did not know existed. My ignorance of both of these works is tied directly to the commentary Lindelof is attempting regarding race in America, the trauma lurking under America’s […]

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Philip Roth’s Indignation

Charles Molesworth — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 11:30:18 +0000

How to best come to terms with the fiction of Philip Roth seems an almost idle question. What need do we have of any special terms? Can’t it simply be the old problem of how best to talk about the books we read, and some of those we come to love? And is it hagiography we […]

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Weighty Topics

Kristen Hoggatt — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:12:43 +0000

I’m trying to lose some weight. Do you know of a poem that can help me? — Candice P., Newport, Rhode Island A poem to help in the short term, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser: “Sometimes my big front teeth bite my lower lip and my food gets all bloody…” Maybe that will […]

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