As a tale of lovestruck Italian nobles, some may mistake “Much Ado About Nothing” for one of the bard’s lighter plays -- but remember things are not always as they seem. Seoul Shakespeare Company’s annual main stage production is stuffed with acting robust enough to go beyond frivolity -- doing justice to a script that, while never short on wit, travels from love to sterner matters of shame, honor and death. Young count Claudio loves the fair Hero, while sharp-tongued Beatrice and Benedick swear

ABU DHABI (AFP) -- The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf.　Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.4 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across the region.　With his Nabati poem, Rajih al-Hamidani was crowned 2016 champion of “Million’s Poet,” staged in oil-rich Abu Dhabi for a seventh

Han Kang says she was never a best-selling writer until now

“A Country Road, A Tree: A Novel”　By Jo Baker　Knopf (304 pages, $26.95)　When war came to Europe in 1939, Samuel Beckett was a published but largely unknown and unread Irish writer working in the long shadow of James Joyce, for whom he’d served as a literary secretary in Paris while the great man was writing “Finnegans Wake.”　By war’s end six years later, Beckett was well on his way to becoming the markedly different writer who would shortly unveil “Waiting for Godot” and who is now justly rememb

“The Gene: An Intimate History” 　By Siddhartha Mukherjee　Scribner (592 pages, $30)　“Like Pythagoras’s triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in “The Gene: An Intimate History,” a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making

“The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich” 　By Lara Feigel　Bloomsbury (443 pages, $32)　It wasn’t just grunts and generals who crossed into Germany at the end of the Second World War. Along with Allied forces, a who’s who of writers, journalists, poets and filmmakers came to observe, report and reconstruct a shattered world.　What they saw shocked and bewildered them. Major cities -- Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne -- had been heavily bombed. The plight of ordina

MIAMI (AFP) - Residue on pottery from an archeological site has revealed the earliest evidence of beer brewing in China left from a 5,000-year-old recipe, researchers said Monday.　The artifacts show that people of the era had already mastered an “advanced beer brewing technique” that contained elements from the East and West, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed U.S. journal.　Yellowish residue gleaned from pottery funnels and wide-mouthed p

HAVANA (AP) -- “Fast and Furious.” U.S. cruise ships. A star-studded private celebration of Chanel. 　The triple tsunami of global capitalism that pounded socialist Cuba this month has spawned a fierce debate about the downside of detente with the United States.Artists, writers and intellectuals who believe deeply in Cuba’s opening to the world are questioning their government’s management of an onslaught of big-money pop culture.  　On an island that prides itself on egalitarianism, sovereignty a

On the night of April 15, a 55-year-old resident of the Ihwa Mural Village surnamed Park and two other accomplices took buckets of gray paint and painted away one of the village’s most famous, flower mosaic-tiled outdoor staircase murals. A week later on April 24, a 45-year-old resident surnamed Kwon and another person followed suit and went on to gray over another of the village’s most photographed 3-D koi fish painted staircase murals.However, this act of vandalism was not committed as a means

Seoul subway is the easiest way to discover city’s cultural gems