Erzulie’s Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara RedBone Press.  242 pages, $15. SET IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, beginning some time after the dictator Trujillo came to power in1930, this book…More

Gifford, author of the excellent Dayneford’s Library (1995) and a scholar of the writer and critic Edward Prime-Stevenson, whom he quotes frequently, has collected about fifty American writers of prose, poetry, and nonfiction, excerpted some of their most telling works, and provided a well-written introduction that instructs the reader on how to read between the lines, remembering to notice bookplates and dedications.

The Lavender Locker Room gets off to a good start by reminding us that the first games recorded in Western history were those organized by Achilles on the beach before Troy following the death and immolation of his passionately loved fellow warrior Patroclus.

A painter and photographer who’s acclaimed by some critics as the best portrait artist in American history, Thomas Eakins is today a very hot property. His 1875 painting The Gross Clinic, which depicts Dr. Samuel Gross performing surgery, is still in the news. Purchased by Thomas Jefferson University in 1878 for $200, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has recently fended off a bid for the painting rumored to be $68 million. Once considered too gory for general display, illustrating as it does Eakins’ thorough understanding of anatomy, it is now considered by some to be the greatest 19th-century American painting.