The recent death from cancer of David Rakoff, the author of three acclaimed collections of essays, is a huge loss...
Rakoff was a marvelous mimic, a fabulous raconteur, a warm, funny, mensch of a guy. He wrote incisively and with what the Fifties Beat poets called "cool," but he was incredibly down-to-earth: you heard it in his pieces for "This American Life" on NPR which are so compelling and different and thought-provoking. And funny. So funny. Read More
"Gore Vidal was entertaining but he was also, like Larry Kramer, challenging. He was fearless, fiercely intelligent, and well spoken. I can’t imagine him ever losing an argument or breaking a sweat. But he was homework, and people don’t like homework." Read More
Famed humorist, author, and National Public Radio personality David Rakoff died on Thursday after a protracted battle with cancer. He was 47.
Rakoff published three essay collections:Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty. He was awarded the 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Humor for Don’t Get Too Comfortable. Read More
Mark O’Donnell, the Tony winning writer behind Hairspray and Cry-Baby and author of the novel Getting Over Homer, died Monday morning in...
It’s always a loss when the great die. It’s less of a loss when they die leaving so much of themselves behind. Vidal lived life more fully than most people can ever envision. Despite his assertion of his icy bastardliness as a person, his work shines and pivots, sparkles and entrances. Read More
Yesterday morning, as the New York Times published their obituary of one of the world’s most beloved illustrators, Maurice Sendak, I watched...
Sendak’s drawings were engaging and his prose accessible, yet both conveyed more complexity than was seen at first glance. That complexity–and the fact that his stories were not always tales with happy endings–was what made Sendak’s work so compelling. He depicted the world in which children live as well as the one they visit--reality and imagination--as visceral, wild and sometimes dark places. Read More
Author and artist Maurice Sendak, who was best known for his iconic and controversial children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83. Read More
We must use what we have to invent what we desire. Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry...
