Brave New World

Huxley impresses more as a thinker than as a stylist, and the issues raised in Brave New World remain vital nearly a century later: security vs. freedom, high culture vs. low, and what it is that makes life worth living.

Portnoy's Complaint

For all the complaining Portnoy does about his mother, the tender heart of this novel consists of the nostalgia with which a lost 33-year-old looks back to the home, neighborhood, and family of his youth. All of that anger and sex and bitter humor is but a flimsy screen behind which resides love.

We Bombed in New Haven

Joseph Heller's play was first seen in New Haven, as it happens, in a Yale production with Stacey Keach in a leading role. It went to Broadway in 1968 and had a respectable run. It is a tribute to the playwright that, reading the play 50 years later, it is possible to imagine a relevant and hilarious staging today. Problems of war, death, and individual autonomy never go stale in the hands of a skilled writer.