THE AMERICAN classical music composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) grew up in wealthy suburban Philadelphia, part of a music-loving family that included his aunt, Metropolitan Opera star contralto Louise Homer, and her husband Sydney, a minor composer. As a result, young Sam was able to meet and move in the world of the major figures in the East Coast classical music scene at an age when most music students would have just been looking on in awe from afar.
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The title of this collection hints at the author’s general approach to his subject matter. He expresses himself as a humble guest at every “feast” he attends, not the host or the guest of honor. In the title essay, the reader is given a tour of Enniscorthy, the town where Tóibín was born in 1955, and where Irish history seems to be embodied in the land itself.
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Along the way, the novel recounts the poet’s early life as the daughter of the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, a credential that would become a liability after the Bolshevik Revolution, her mother’s death, and the poet’s marriage at nineteen to Sergei Efron, who would later enlist in the White Army during the Russian Civil War.
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The plot, if Hugs and Cuddles may be said to have a plot, concerns the narrator’s obsession with the “engineer,” a childhood friend with whom he innocently used to wrestle, “working surreptitiously so our true intentions could remain unnoticed.” “Our dicks,” the narrator notes, “were ahead of our maturity.”
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Best Minds follows the poet through his rise to countercultural stardom in the 1960s and after. It touches on Ginsberg’s close relationship with Orlovsky, who was addicted to drugs—a complicated bond that warrants more attention than it receives in the book. Weine acknowledges that Ginsberg was no saint (as the poet’s defiant membership in the North American Man/ Boy Love Association makes clear), but his faith in his mentor remains steadfast.
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The Humble Lover is White’s thirty-first published book. With an œuvre as vast as this, it feels a little beside the point to be disappointed by this new novel.
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Ramadan deftly captures what it means to be a homosexual in a deeply religious culture racked with political violence, where nearly every aspect of life is dictated by tradition and the Koran, which in turn is driven by the patriarchal and the masculine.
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In Memoriam captures the atmosphere of elite public schools at the time, especially the rampant, barely concealed homoeroticism, often mixed with violence.
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Almost Obscene contains poems referring to Mary Renault, Stendhal, and Constantine Cavafy, plus a string of poems on mythological and historical figures, including Theseus, Medea, Antinous, and Scheherazade.
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FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Aleksandar Hemon believes in the transcendent power of an enduring passionate love to allow one to survive the world’s horrors and indignities. This belief is what drives his new novel, The World and All That It Holds.
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