From the moment I read the first line of this book, In those days, everyone knew everyone on the island,...
My Poems Won’t Change the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Bilingual Edition) is an unmitigated, extensive collection of complex and...
The Art of Joy is a novel of ideas. It’s concerned with birth, life, and death, the education of women, politics, social and cultural history, sexuality, free love, psychoanalysis, familial bonds, childrearing, and more. Read More
Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director details Jack O’Brien’s induction into theater through the Association of Producing Artists (APA) Repertory Company , his movement from an actor into a director, and his emergence as a major presence in the theater world in the 1970s. Read More
How does one write a biography of someone who has been dead for 40 years, was a bit of a recluse their whole life, and whom few people really knew. If you are Mary Blume, and the subject is Cristobal Balenciaga, one of fashion's most unique designers, you focus on the fashion itself... Read More
Marco Roth grew up in a well-to-do Jewish family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but, like all unhappy...
Lisa Cohen’s lush biography, All We Know (Farrar Straus and Giroux), is a staggering labor of love that offers a triptych of three women of a queer persuasion. Cohen sets this story in the early 20th century, giving her audience a catalogue of the largely forgotten life during that time. Her subjects--the great intellectual Esther Murphy, the celebrity connoisseur Mercedes de Acosta, and the fashion maverick Madge Garland... Read More
The annual Triangle Awards, recognizing excellence in gay and lesbian literature, were presented last night at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. Also honored were activist and literary agent Frances Goldin, winner of this year’s Leadership Award, and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who received the 2012 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Read More
On its surface, the story of Coral Glynn appears simple: the titular nurse Coral arrives at Hart House to care for an elderly woman dying of cancer, and her son, Major Clement Hart, takes a shine to her. In less deft hands, this material would be ripe for all sorts of weeping and rending of garments, but Cameron works with a deft hand, never succumbing to histrionics. Read More
By Blood, Ellen Ullman’s latest novel, is a noir gem. The novel is creepy-exciting and skillfully ironic at almost every turn, with a narrator’s voice snaking through the measured text. It is a voice that is appalling, brilliantly perverted, cunning and smart—and desperate for redemption. Read More
