Autobiographical Novel

THE BROTHERS BLOOM ** (Showtime on Comcast) A con game about con games, this fable about brotherly scam artists (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) is manic fun until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at the same pace. It's like being trapped in a hall of mirrors with a performing poodle that doesn't know how to stop. (PG-13; runs through Sept. 6) TY BURR CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP *** (Comcast Movies: All Movies) A messy but fascinating documentary about the comedian's 44-city tour of America after getting forced off "The Tonight Show.

THE BROTHERS BLOOM ** (Showtime on Comcast) A con game about con games, this fable about brotherly scam artists (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) is manic fun until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at the same pace. It's like being trapped in a hall of mirrors with a performing poodle that doesn't know how to stop. (PG-13; runs through Sept. 6) TY BURR CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP *** (Comcast Movies: All Movies) A messy but fascinating documentary about the comedian's 44-city tour of America after getting forced off "The Tonight Show.

PAWTUCKET, R.I. - “Boy, that was fun,’’ a man deadpanned as the audience rose from its seats to leave the Gamm Theatre after watching - or should that be surviving? - “4:48 Psychosis.’’ His need to find release in humor was understandable, and, to judge by the ripple of laughter that greeted his remark, widely shared. For 72 minutes, we had all been locked inside the agony of another human being - a primal scream of a play that was almost unbearable at times. But we also knew we had just witnessed a performance of astonishing intensity by Casey Seymour Kim as...

In Gunter Grass’s 2007 memoir “Peeling the Onion,’’ the writer recounts the favorable impact his early poems and stories made on the members of a Berlin writing group in the 1950s. Soon after he received these accolades, however, Grass became dissatisfied. He felt that his art would remain insignificant unless it addressed a subject that was central to German post-war life: “the massive weight of the German past.’’ Grass’s novel of the World War II era and its aftermath, “The Tin Drum’’ (1959)

CONCORD, N.H. - Tad Mosel, television screenwriter and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "All the Way Home," died Sunday at a hospice in Concord, N.H. He was 86. Up until very recently, he wrote every day and finished a play about trying to reconnect with people from one's past, said longtime friend Ted Walch. "In a great exchange with his doctor about three weeks ago, when Tad was very irritated that he hadn't yet died, that it was taking so long, the doctor said to him, 'Dying is harder than writing a play, and Tad responded, 'Not really,' " Walch said.

The Knitting Circle, By Ann Hood, Norton, 346 pp., $24.95 Two years after losing her daughter to a virulent strain of strep, years in which novelist Ann Hood found herself unable to read, to write, to focus on anything at all, she received a call for submissions from a literary magazine on the theme of lying. That night she sat down and composed an essay on lies about grief. That essay revived her ability to write, and presumably laid the foundation for "The Knitting Circle," Hood's autobiographical novel about a mother coping with the loss of her only child.

Our appetite for “reality’’ seems to have no bottom, to wit the latter-day memoir, which started out as fad, leapt to trend, and now apparently has settled into something like solid literary staple. As has been widely observed, today’s literary memoir often resembles what was once labeled an autobiographical novel. Of course liberties were taken with autobiography then, and if a contemporary memoirist is smart, liberties are taken now, which is to say readers are probably less interested in getting the so-called facts about someone they do not know...

How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood By Thomas Beller Norton, 256 pp., paperback, $14.95 It's hard not to share Thomas Beller's affection for his younger self. He is sweetly nostalgic for who he was, who he wanted to be, what he had and didn't know how to value. A clever city child, he grew up in the 1970s on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he also held a number of short-term jobs while becoming a writer. In "Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man," Beller cherishes the memory of checking inventory behind a pillar of brown sugar in the basement of H & H...

In Gunter Grass’s 2007 memoir “Peeling the Onion,’’ the writer recounts the favorable impact his early poems and stories made on the members of a Berlin writing group in the 1950s. Soon after he received these accolades, however, Grass became dissatisfied. He felt that his art would remain insignificant unless it addressed a subject that was central to German post-war life: “the massive weight of the German past.’’ Grass’s novel of the World War II era and its aftermath, “The Tin Drum’’ (1959)

For all his travels and all his fame, a part of Jack Kerouac never really left Lowell, the city where he was raised and shaped long before the world came to know him as the author of "On the Road. " Monday, on what would have been Kerouac's 90th birthday, Merrimack Repertory Theatre and the University of Massachusetts Lowell will announce that "Beat Generation," Kerouac's only full-length play, will be presented in a series of staged readings this fall in his hometown. Billed as a world premiere, "Beat Generation" will be performed eight times from...

Our appetite for “reality’’ seems to have no bottom, to wit the latter-day memoir, which started out as fad, leapt to trend, and now apparently has settled into something like solid literary staple. As has been widely observed, today’s literary memoir often resembles what was once labeled an autobiographical novel. Of course liberties were taken with autobiography then, and if a contemporary memoirist is smart, liberties are taken now, which is to say readers are probably less interested in getting the so-called facts about someone they do not know than they are in experiencing something...

PAWTUCKET, R.I. - “Boy, that was fun,’’ a man deadpanned as the audience rose from its seats to leave the Gamm Theatre after watching - or should that be surviving? - “4:48 Psychosis.’’ His need to find release in humor was understandable, and, to judge by the ripple of laughter that greeted his remark, widely shared. For 72 minutes, we had all been locked inside the agony of another human being - a primal scream of a play that was almost unbearable at times. But we also knew we had just witnessed a performance of...

CONCORD, N.H. - Tad Mosel, television screenwriter and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "All the Way Home," died Sunday at a hospice in Concord, N.H. He was 86. Up until very recently, he wrote every day and finished a play about trying to reconnect with people from one's past, said longtime friend Ted Walch. "In a great exchange with his doctor about three weeks ago, when Tad was very irritated that he hadn't yet died, that it was taking so long, the doctor said to him, 'Dying is harder than writing a play, and Tad responded, 'Not really,' " Walch...

The Knitting Circle, By Ann Hood, Norton, 346 pp., $24.95 Two years after losing her daughter to a virulent strain of strep, years in which novelist Ann Hood found herself unable to read, to write, to focus on anything at all, she received a call for submissions from a literary magazine on the theme of lying. That night she sat down and composed an essay on lies about grief. That essay revived her ability to write, and presumably laid the foundation for "The Knitting Circle," Hood's autobiographical novel about a mother coping with the loss of her only child.

How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood By Thomas Beller Norton, 256 pp., paperback, $14.95 It's hard not to share Thomas Beller's affection for his younger self. He is sweetly nostalgic for who he was, who he wanted to be, what he had and didn't know how to value. A clever city child, he grew up in the 1970s on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he also held a number of short-term jobs while becoming a writer. In "Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man," Beller cherishes the memory of checking inventory behind a pillar of brown sugar in the basement of H &...

Belmont author Tom Perrotta 's getting a lot of press - much of it positive - for his new book, "The Leftovers. " (Three mentions in The New York Times in a week seems like a lot, no?) Tuesday, the author dubbed "the Steinbeck of suburbia" treated a crowd of fans to a passage from the novel during a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. There were a few familiar faces in the crowd, including Oscar winner Chris Cooper and his wife, Marianne , writer Janet Tashjian , and Providence-based author Ann Hood , with whom Perrotta has something in common: Hood's...

Crossbones By Nuruddin Farah (Riverhead, $27.95) Novel traces return of exiles to a Somalia marked by bombs, jihadists and pirates. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 By Ian Kershaw (Penguin, $35) New history posits that belief in a tyrant pushed Germany to fight to the bitter end. We the Animals By Justin Torres (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18) Sensitive, autobiographical novel narrated by the youngest brother of three from inside his wild childhood.