There is something to be said about a story that can hit your brain in such a way that reading is impossible for a week.  This story did this to me.  Compared to his novels, which seem more structured and rigid, Mann's short stories have more freedom and show a touch of German whimsy.  "Mario and the Magician" actually functions much like a thriller, building tension and foreshadowing a horror.  It still takes a rigid structure but Mann clearly moves it into the realm of the grotesque and the romantic sublime.  While this does occur at points in his novel, The Magic Mountain, it takes on a different aura when compacted and marketed without the theoretical footwork of The Magic Mountain.
In conclusion, read "Mario and the Magician" as it shows cracks in Mann's stylistic armour and you love him more as a writer for it.

Life may be easier for the police if the criminals behaved like they do in Poirot, but then again the police do not have the little grey cells of Monsieur Poirot.  On its surface this is detective fiction, and some of the most early crime fiction.  However, this review is about the television series and not the literature as I have never picked up one of the books.  The series, though, is a marvelous thing with all of the genre's elements: murder every second day, the clue that cannot be found, and suspects coming out of the woodwork.  One could criticize the genre and Poirot  for following a predictable and repetitive narrative arch -- the crime, the clue, and the highly elaborate process of revealing the true criminal -- but that would be missing the point.  The series is about the thought process, putting together the clues, and then the delightful way it all is painted together in the end.  If the criminal always confesses it is not because of a lack of imagination by Christie, but rather because Poirot is so brilliant that the criminal is painted into a corner.  It also doesn't hurt that it is an English series and so the criminals generally show a dignity in defeat.

Written in roughly the same period as the hard-boiled detective fiction of the U.S.A., Poirot presents a different picture of the world and would allow a wonderful cross-cultural comparison with works such as Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.

This is Van Vechten's last novel and it captures the end of the splendid drunken twenties in New York.  It tracks the drunken spirals of absurd characters as they feel the entire brunt of hedonism gone mad.  However, it is not be confused with a moral diatribe against hedonism as it is a thoughtful/meandering exploration of how dance and drink can form the basis for social commentary.  The opening lines of this novel say much and sell the rest of it wonderfully: "Hamish Wilding was very drunk at the time, but he never afterwards forgot the distorted figure of David Westlake as he appeared to him, hatless, his hair mussed, in the bar of the Harlem speakeasy where they had agreed to meet.  There was blood on David's lips as they opened to cry: I've killed a man or a man has killed me."

Hopefully this provides a sense of the nature of this wonderful novel that rivals F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Bergman, once called the "dour director" by a friend of mine, presents what I find to be a humorous work that contradicts this statement.  Filled with lively characters that are continually at odds with the physically present Death, The Seventh Seal lightens up one's inability to defeat death.  Literally, the chess match between the crusader and death is the battle, but no character is free from Death as he will not be stopped as, in one scene, he takes a saw to a tree in order to kill Plog the Smith.

On a personal note, I watched this film with my friends Kyla Lee (www.kylalee.ca) and Ilia Korkh and we could not help laughing and snickering throughout the entire film.  Perhaps this was not the original intention of the film, but authorial intention can go to hell as the film is amusing and joyous with a touch of the dour underneath it all.

As will be clear from this review, I use the term "film" loosely.  This series, with comically wonderful Rowan Atkinson, follows different incarnations of Edmond Blackadder throughout time.  Note, season one is awful, but after that you receive the real history of England.  It is the combination of sharp wit and slapstick that is what makes this show work for me as I keep on waiting for the next "cunning plan" -- there is always a more cunning plan on the horizon.  Comedy aside, there is more to be found within this series as the futility of opposing the monstrous power of rulers is examined while leaving the possibility of melancholic hope that there can be personal victories.

On the right you will see the primary cast with two of my favorites: Frye and Laurie

Nightwood is what I would call High Modernism as it is unapologetically vague and difficult.  However, this is the part of the joy of the work.  I personally like to read it for the mood it is able to create in my mind as the different characters strike each other in isolated and alienated ways.  There are other ways to approach Nightwood though.  It is often examined as an autobiographical work, dealing with Barne's lesbian affairs, but the amount of information provided in the book and in her life is not nearly enough to probe the biography of all the different images and stories. 

I like to think of Barne's writing as always archaic in a modern time without using archaic language as all the character are full of hubris as morality plays are enacted during pilgrimages.