In an interview with the Chicago Tribune 20 years ago, Gerda Lerner said, "When I started working on women’s history about 30 years ago, the field did not exist. People didn’t think women had a history worth knowing." Read More
I can’t remember when freedom of speech didn’t matter to me. Perhaps it was from growing up with activist parents...
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
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
Since I first discovered John Irving while I was in college, with his breakout novel, The World According to Garp,...
With yet another global warming summer upon us, it’s time to head to the beach, the mountains or maybe just...
He didn’t obfuscate with his sci-fi and fantasy stories–he was always detailing the complexities of the interior life of his characters within the context of a vivid cultural and physical landscape, regardless of where those characters were situated. And in his lush, lyrical descriptions the marginal became central. Read More
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
Like everyone who has won–or lost–an award, I have mixed feelings about them. It’s good to be a nominee/finalist, great to be a winner, not so wonderful to lose, unsettling to be judged. Yet I like the principle of giving people recognition for the hard work that propels talent to the next place. Read More
