A Martian Muse contains 25 of Shepherd’s final essays, ranging across several categories, with titles that include “Poetics and Poetry,” “Art and Society,” “Artistic Production,” “Intention, Aspiration, Inspiration,” and “Illness, Identity, and Poetry.”
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Review of Insignificant Others by Stephen McCauley, and Missouri by Christine Wunnicke.
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WHOEVER put together the index of the English decorator Nicholas Haslam’s memoir evidently had a low opinion of the reasons people read a book like his. When I had to look up George Dyer (the lover of the painter Francis Bacon), I discovered that the index consists entirely of names.
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SUSAN SELLERS’ novel is an imaginative glimpse into the Bloomsbury circle of artists and intellectuals, and the two sisters—painter Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf—who were at the heart of it. In a series of vignettes, many of them lovely prose poems, Vanessa, the narrator of the novel, addresses Virginia, who is already dead, having killed herself in 1941.
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THIS IS a strange and marvelous bird of a novel. On its surface, The Silver Hearted is an adventure story that convincingly channels the classics of that genre. A layer below the surface ripples a sharp critique of colonial and post-colonial themes that go further than Conrad or Forster could have done.
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AT THE END of this tantalizing, informative, erudite and resourceful book, English and Women & Gender Studies academic Elisa Glick quotes one of her illustrious predecessors, Rhonda Garelick, on the figure of the dandy: “Critics writing about dandies or their texts fall easily into dandyist style, and succumb to its charms.”
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LEO BERSANI begins this collection of essays with a concise list of his three major interests: sexuality, psychoanalysis, and æsthetics. To readers not familiar with Bersani’s work, this list suggests that the book will be more traditionally academic—and dull—than it turns out to be. A better sense of what Bersani is about is found in the second of two interviews that conclude the collection.
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ASSUMPTIONS about what gay life and culture were like before Stonewall—that it was an era of all-consuming repression, secrecy, and shame—might lead one to conclude that depictions of gay people in film and literature were non-existent or, if they did surface, heavily coded. Many film historians have examined the movies of this period, but the history of gay literature, which arguably provides perhaps an even richer history, has not been explored as thoroughly. Of course, one must be willing to allow for a more expansive and inclusive definition of what constitutes “literature.”
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THIS EXTENDED ESSAY explores the competing visions of Socrates and Jesus, demonstrating how their debate, continued by their philosophical ancestors over two millennia, helped shape Western culture into the uniquely argumentative, individualistic force it would become by the time of the Enlightenment.
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What makes The Summer We Fell Apart a beautiful novel is its stellar characters-and the shimmering scenes it evokes to draw you into their lives as a participant. You find yourself really caring about the four Haas siblings, now that you understand how they became the dysfunctional adults that they are today, and you hope they’ll make it as they struggle through their lives.
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