"Although any one of the recent godsend rush of Kurosawa releases could go in this slot. For years now this gem (and much of his filmography) has only been available for us poor Region 1 sods on crappy import discs, and though the broken English subtitles via a bad Chinese translation had a sometimes poetic dadaistic flair, it’s a relief to finally have a beautiful, intelligible disc of it. The film itself stands easily up to Stray Dog and High and Low as one of Kurosawa’s best contemporary crime dramas."

"Once Around is a beautiful movie. And it was funny, and it was moving, and it was great. The story itself, which is a true story, is such a remarkable — simple, but not simple — story about a woman who falls in love with a guy who is kind of socially unacceptable. He’s loud, and her family just thinks he’s chalk on a blackboard. It’s how they come to love him. Holly Hunter is fantastic. It’s actually quite a brilliant movie, and I’ve always been extremely proud of it."

"Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose."

"I just love this book. When I was halfway through it—right around when one of the three daughters tries to talk to her father and he goes out into a storm—I was like, “Oh my God, this is King Lear.” I was so impressed with how Smiley was able to take such a classic tale and put it in rural 20th-century Iowa. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, it’s everything King Lear is—and it’s effortless. I was blown away by the imagination, intellect and talent it must have taken to do that."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."

"I first discovered The Little Prince when I was in high school and fell in love with the book straight away. My make-up artist has a tattoo of the Little Prince on the side of her leg, so I’m often reminded of what a beautiful story it is. It’s a sweet fable about the relationship between a little boy and his love for a rose. There is such a strong philosophy of love and loneliness running throughout the book that I can’t help but return to it again and again"