D.H. Lawrence

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi A Novel Geoff Dyer Pantheon: 296 pp., $24 Why do education and cynicism so often go hand in hand? Heaven forbid an intellectual should be wholehearted or, God help us, earnest about anything. Geoff Dyer is an...

WATCHING President Bush wax poetic about U.S. relations with its neighbor to the south, you can't help but feel deja vu all over again. We've heard this romantic tale before. It began when Bush declared at the beginning of his first term that he was...

By Richard Rayner "A good writer can make you believe time stands still. Yet the end of all stories, even if the writer forbears to mention it, is death," wrote the English writer Angela Carter, who died 16 years ago this month. At the time Carter was...

LA JOLLA -- Imagine Joan Crawford's stately glamour, Susan Hayward's tough-broad shtick and Carol Burnett's parodic flair all rolled into the same male actor. Yes, the one and only Charles Busch is back on stage, starring in your garden-variety science-...

The Winter Sun Notes on a Vocation Fanny Howe Graywolf Press: 210 pp., $15 paper "The formation of our relationship to the world (for some of us) is experienced as an unfolding." This is how poet and essayist Fanny Howe has always written about the...

MINUTES from the shores of Lake Huron in western Ontario, three towns form an isosceles triangle, bounded by no more than 50 kilometers, that Alice Munro's readers may know well. Wingham (pop. 2,885) is where the author was born in 1931. Clinton (pop. 3,...

MOVIE REVIEWS In France's 'Lady Chatterley,' lovers cross class boundaries as their desire unfurls slowly, beautifully. Nothing sexual is forbidden to today's filmmakers, but paradoxically, that has made some things more difficult to put on screen. While...

By Richard Rayner "He had the build of a plunging halfback, with big shoulders and a neck like the stump of a Douglas fir," wrote Malcolm Cowley, who taught Ken Kesey in a writing class at Stanford in 1960. "Chapters of a novel were read aloud in a...

Mary Austin and the American West Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson University of California Press: 324 pp., $29.95 Few writers of her period overcame more obstacles than Mary Austin. Stuck in a disappointing marriage, Austin (1868-1934) spent the...

Jack Cardiff, the British cinematographer who won an Academy Award for his stunning color work on the 1947 drama "Black Narcissus" and later became an Oscar-nominated director, has died. He was 94. Cardiff, who as a cinematographer was known as a pioneer...

Can a formidable actress redeem a pile of solemn erotic kitsch? Kate Winslet answers that one as honestly as she can in the film version of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel "The Reader," the tale of a 15-year-old West German boy who, in 1958, embarks on an...

You walk slowly on the Path of the Gods high above Positano for fear of cutting a switchback short and falling over a cliff. Your imagination starts playing tricks, keeping you on the lookout for brigands and satyrs. You get used to going astray on trails...