If anyone can pull off the role of satirical, socio-political prophet and shnooky belletrist, it’s Gary Shteyngart. The author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Shteyngart is one of the punchiest and funniest young novelists out there. His writing, colored and coarsened by the blunt cynicism of his 1970s upbringing in the Soviet Union, draws on intricate tessellations of classic Russian literature, self-deprecating Semitic humor, and current global politics. Being a Jew born in 1972 in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union and having immigrated to Queens in 1979, he has achieved status as a perpetual outsider, who can observe from remove and criticize with greater perspicacity.

Bereavement can be rather grave in certain circumstances, and the loss of decorum- the circumstance I address this very instant- has its sufficient fill of seriousness.

American vernacular explodes ecstatically, euphorically such that it becomes positively contagious—seeping into our speech patterns, our lives. The use of sexual terms  augments our tendency and predisposition for this vernacular, but it too can be found in other languages.  Ben Johnson himself said: “Language best shows a man; speak ...

St. Paul once wrote, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Rebecca Sealfon ’05 probably would have kicked his ass.

Ah, the Hook-up: the quintessential college social experience. More
which survives the weekend to circulate 'til the next Thursday. Delightfully suggestive of scandal, the very term "hook-up" is perfectly suited to describing to one's friends a wide array of encounters: specific enough to provide gossip fodder, vague enough to spare the listener unnecessary detail.

This is the man who melted the Cold War. This is the man who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. This is the man who signed two broad disarmament pacts and ended communist rule in Eastern Europe. This is also the man who did a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997.
But what was he doing in the Trenton, New Jersey on Monday afternoon?

Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
-Pancho Villa, last words

For a kid with a fear of the dark, public bathrooms, flying, and dying alone, I embarked intrepidly on a transatlantic cruise that mirrored the intended route of the ill-fated Titanic of 1912 from port at Southampton to New York City.
In fact, I crossed the second largest ocean in ...

...The gravedigger’s laugh turns to hacking as he takes off his soiled gloves and exposes his hands, which are caked with cemetery earth...

Come closer, come closer (my pretty, my sweet): let me feel your weight on my chest, the rubber soles of your sneakers marking my skin pink. I feel you, lingering, some feet away—hesitant, glancing shyly at this patch of grass, not raising your eyes to the stone that marks it...

Cocksure I stand that this lesbian play has become the first theatrical hit to reach Princeton this school year.
How fine it is to go to the theater and find yourself in a proper Boston living room, replete with pomp and circumstance. But take this turn of the 20th century propriety and subvert it with the sexual lewdness of nowadays; mix in marital deceit and seduction of a young lass by a voluptuous lesbian, and you’ll get the formula for David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, the first play of the Theatre Intime season.

Forget about Atkins. Don’t give South Beach or any other fad diets a second thought. Here’s the crème-de-la-crème for you: The Dorm Room Diet (Newmarket Press, $16.95, 240p.) by Daphne Oz ’08, without any of those fancy letters after her name denoting medical credentials and expertise. But don’t worry, she’ll help you succeed and make a killing doing it.

“TRUST but verify,” goes the Old Russian proverb, and such a maxim can apply to the Guggenheim’s current “RUSSIA!” exhibit, which seems to require further probing – further verification – to find the reason for the obvious compensation attempted by using all capital letters and an exclamation point in its title.

What a supremely difficult task it would be to make Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a theatrical catastrophe given the rich nature of the existentialism, the slap-stick comedy, the downright absurdism.
That said, what a trying undertaking it is to do complete justice to the text of Beckett’s ...

Out of all the streets in the world stretching from Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg to Lombard Street in San Francisco, I have spent the most time traversing Witherspoon and Nassau here in my hometown of Princeton, watching the dynamic of businesses, the ebb and flow of success and decline.

It’s a show of love, soul, ravished innocence, sexual passion, emotional pain, Nordic landscapes.
At a time in which art shows tend toward the massive; jam-packed galleries swarming with fat-upper-armed women loaded with streams of banalities, New York has been granted a reprieve at the MoMA by an artist best known for the now-stolen painting “The Scream”.

It takes an impresario to found a Russian movement.
But for a moment’s continued interest in the present, a queer and inexplicable slavophilia must appear to have its dance with history. And now, 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, with access to loans of prestigious paintings ...

Jed Peterson ’06 has created an epic version of the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet – so creative and grand that his remains the best Shakespeare performed at Princeton in the past few years and the best play thus far of Princeton’s 2005-2006 theatrical season.
The success of ...

A French damsel and I decided to take a train
To New York to see the Gates and be at play.
You were late to the Dinky and had to book
It to meet me by the stop to pause, smoke, and spring
Off the platform—covered in Bohemian clothes ...

Get the memo: Yeats isn’t just a poet, as is his overwhelming identity to the intellectual bourgeoisie. Just ask John Raimo ’08 or co-director Courtny Hopen about their Cuchulain Comforted, the name they’ll given for a selection of At the Hawk’s Well, On Baile’s Strand, and The Death of Cuchulain—three plays in a series of five Yeats wrote about the virile Irish mythical hero.

It all came to me freshman year while studying Russian syntax and reading some Puskin. I’m there with a semi-erect penis (a state in which I often find myself when studying anything Slavic) and snacking on a chocolate chip cookie from Olives. I look up from my black leather ...

Like the juiciest of farts, the relieving and incredibly human production of The Playboy of the Western World arouses in the depths of your belly that sort of visceral, ancient laughter perhaps only possible and appropriate in Irish villages. It’s evident to all, not just to theater experts, that ...

Tickling the teeth, the tongue, the lips, Dr. Rabinowitz-Drillstein would jab various metal objects into my mouth during my visits to his dentist office. Though the majority of dentists will have at their most depressed of times the faint scent of Scotch or some strong digestif, my humble tooth doctor lacked this characteristic, and quite mysteriously so.

Espionage becomes us. We traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend on a reconnaissance training mission to discover restaurants and entertainment venues that snarky Harvard students frequent. Posing as Mr. Black and Mrs. White – and alternately Vladimir Bolshoi Khoi and Natasha Krasavitsa – we penetrated the scene incognito, speaking in tongues unfamiliar ...

As a self-proclaimed solipsist, I have always attached much importance to my name and seen it manifest itself in the least expected of places. But in my pampered youth of Plaza teas surrounded by the redolence of a fine Cavendish tobacco blend among glasses of Scotch filled three-fingers high, I ...

Just walk in Micawber Books, now as it phases out its inventory in preparation to close its doors in March, and you will undoubtedly bear witness to a sad scene, not quite of mourning but of definite melancholy, downtrodden emotion. Yes, of course, the friendly staff is still smiling; Bobbie Fishman, a long-time employee, interestedly asks what I need help finding, but there is a somber air looming over the store: the shelves in the used-book section have been disassembled and piled in orderly disarray, the stacks in the new-books section increasingly reveal empty wood as customers continue to remove the books and buy them at heavily discounted prices.

Roger Q. Mason is controversy. Roger Q. Mason is change. Roger Q. Mason is revolution.
“Every good revolution happens behind locked doors,” he proclaims, sealing the portals leading to Theatre Intime’s Charrier Room. He’s been directing rehearsals for seven weeks now in preparation for the February 23 opening ...

Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.

Given the impenetrable penumbra of mystery surrounding the secret letter from the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) to President Shirley Tilghman about the Chabad Affair, one may question the current adequacy of the support for Jewish life at Princeton. Though Princeton may overtly seem a welcoming environment for Jews, recent ...

When I meet Howard Nuer ’07, a Hassidic Jewish student, three Sundays ago in his room, I am struck most by his bookshelf—filled to the gills with advanced math books and Hebrew scripture. The math major sits relaxed at his desk, which is covered in papers scratched with, alternatively ...

It would seem the mad dash to fill the Nass’s literary issue might best warrant a clandestine mafia negotiation; by this logic, the editors (in fedoras and spats, sure, and affecting a Sicilian shtick) would send out coercive e-mails to campus literary types, who would know better than to ...

Cinema

During a slow weekend this past July in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rob Madole, Tim Nunan, and John Nelson started scheming, started to talk of raising hell.

Though it might otherwise be dismissed as a horribly-written play, Me, Myself & I inspires additional disappointment, flowing as it does from the pen of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. A moving and clever piece, it is not. Perhaps the only element that could have saved and justified its stodgy formal progression—an insistent meta-theatricality—comes off as forced, hackneyed, dismissible. Yes, Albee reveals, these are actually actors onstage. We get it. Got it. Good.

<i>That I spent the first 13 years of my life living with a Jamaican woman is always striking to those who best know me. Seldom, I suppose, is the topic broached in casual parley. So when I reveal I have a Jamaican accent, I am often faced with guffaws ...