Weekend books.

Michael Atkinson, Stuart Klawans, Ed Halter, David Sterritt, B Kite, "and maybe Guy Maddin, if he's not exhausted," will be reading from Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood in Manhattan on June 11.

The new summer issue of Bookforum's up. Bilge Ebiri: "Whereas Brick Lane the four-hundred-plus-page novel was sprawling, spanning decades and even continents, Brick Lane the movie, running at just over a hundred minutes, is a model of focus and precision - a streamlined slice-of-life tale about a woman who finds herself faced with a difficult choice."

Also:

• "Because [Doris] Day is as much signifier as star, it's astonishing that few have tackled her work in relation to the mores of her time and ours," writes Marc Weingarten. "In Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, David Kaufman has certainly made a nice run at it. His book is, in all senses of the word, exhaustive: It omits no detail of Day's life and career. But it fails to provide the sort of intellectual heft the subject warrants - the synoptic detail in Kaufman's narrative consistently crowds out context and analysis."

• Kera Bolonik interviews Ron Hansen, author of, among other novels, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

• And then, besides all the rest - any new issue is a highlight of the online reading season, however much or little it might have to do with cinema - there's a casual symposium on fiction and politics.

Congrats to Tim Lucas on his Independent Publisher Book Award for Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Night.

David Gordon Green has written the introduction to Vern's Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal and the Guardian's running an edited version: "Who wants to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in Death Warrant or Cyborg when you could witness the brutal human elegance of Seagal's Marked for Death or the astonishing Hard to Kill? His stretch of films that promoted themselves with three dramatic words was for me a trademark and a guarantee that I would be getting my money's worth."

"Brideshead Revisited has exerted a powerful hold on the British imagination for more than 60 years, although it's far from obvious why," writes John Walsh in the Independent. "Its structure is shockingly broken-backed. One of its most attractive characters disappears halfway through. An undercurrent of anti-egalitarian snobbery becomes a tidal wave. The central love story is treated by the author like a conveyancing contract. And the characters' preoccupation with Catholicism doesn't ring true. But Brideshead has Unassailable Classic status and, as the producers of a new film have found, one mucks about with it at one's peril."

New reviews of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure: Raymond Bonner (NYT), Michael Byers (Guardian) and Michael S Roth (Los Angeles Times).

Posted by dwhudson at May 24, 2008 7:51 AM