Rand Richards Cooper

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of two works of fiction, The Last to Go and Big As Life. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and many other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories. A longtime contributor to Bon Appétit and a former restaurant critic for The New York Times, Rand lives in Hartford with his family and has been a critic and essayist for Commonweal for nearly three decades. He runs the judging panel for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

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'The Babadook'

Jennifer Kent’s "The Babadook" is a horror film that abjures cheap thrills and builds its terrors securely atop a base of all-too-familiar human pain.
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'Listen Up Philip'

The reduction of character and motive to diagrammable banalities seems of a piece with this film’s lack of interest in creating anything resembling human emotion.