Megan Wilson: The Pusuit of Love

The girl in me totally loves this. Looks even prettier in person.

The Mitford sisters were notorious English aristocrats in the years between the world wars. Two were fascists (one was even friends with Hitler) while another two became a muckraking journalist and a social stirist.

"The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world."

New Criterion DVDs

Our reader, Gould, pointed us to these gorgeous new DVD packages from Criterion. Thank you, Gould!

Vampyr, a 1932 film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, concerns an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.

High and Low is a 1962 Akira Kurosawa film adaptied frrom Ed McBain's detective novel King's Ransom. Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society.

Trafic, a 1971 film by Jacques Tati, is the final Monsieur Hulot film. It is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’s expert timing and sidesplitting visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.

Summaries adapted from Criterion.

Gabriele Wilson: The Pieces from Berlin

Lucia Muller-Ross is an outsider living in Berlin during WWII. She helps Jews by smuggling their valuables abroad. Anticipating that the owners will not survive the war, Lucia sets up shop in Switerland and amasses a fortune selling her treasures. Fifty years later, a Holocaust survivor named Sarah sees her family's antique table in Lucia's shop window...

Stock Photos of the Day

Pizza is the new black.

Thank you, Corbis!

Milan Bozic: Day In Day Out

There's a wonderful texture to the paper this is printed on (click to enlarge). It is the story of a young Balkan man traveling through "the newly multicultural Europe...and an exploration of a deeply disturbed individual." Interestingly, "...the book's take on being gay doesn't have much in common with U.S. norms or conflicts."