Christopher O'Riley From the Top recently taped two episodes at UConn/Storrs and the sumptuous Peace Center in Greenville, SC. I’ve been having the most cleansing and enlightening time these days working on the 6th Partita (especially after reading John Eliot Gardiner’s recent biography, Music in the Castle of Heaven set to the accompaniment of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s complete …
Chuck Palahniuk is another writer whose complete work I’ve obsessively read ever since happening upon his pre-Saw-series book of guilt, damnation and retribution, Haunted. His grasp and horror at contemporary mores and pop culture-as-cancer at its most Rabelaisian/Swiftian coupled with an addictive prose style reminiscent of the sublimely slaking effervescence of Dickens or Rushdie make …
I very rarely stray into horror much anymore, except in the masterful hands of a Stephen Graham Jones, Joe R. Lansdale, Laird Barron, Lucius Shepard, Thomas Ligotti, Richard Laymon. So when I saw this title posted atop a Scariest 100 Horror Novels of All Time list at #1, I figured I should pay attention, particularly …
Highly recommended by readers (and writers) I trust, I was blessedly led to this most unique and memorable book by M. T. Anderson, much of which is the journal of the eponymous son of an African princess, raised and educated at a pre-Revolution center for philosophical inquiry in Boston, the Novanglian College of Lucidity. Octavian …
Wrapped Episode #296 of From the Top on Friday night under the aegis of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Washington Performing Arts at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. FTT’s relationship with the Cooke Foundation has now been a 10-year partnership, and through their generosity and enthusiasm (Stuart Haney from Cooke has long been a …
Imagine going through life as a self-considered devotee of the cinema, with favorite directors (Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese, Coen Brothers, Tarantino, to name a few) occupying a place of worship in my heart. Imagine, then, a sudden discovery of a whole body of work, an auteur, who becomes your sole cinematic obsession. I’d heard of Bob …