THE SACRED BAND is a tourist’s guide to events that took place between 378 and 338 BCE in the location of today’s Greece, but in fact the time period covered includes explanatory material and connective tissue from somewhat earlier times in a region spanning from Sicily to Persia.
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Radiant offers a well-researched account of the scientific and creative processes of two driven experimenters who reached worldwide fame. Marie Curie helped inaugurate the atomic age, with unhappy as well as positive consequences. The institute she founded in Paris is now a research center focused on biophysics, cell biology, and oncology, with an affiliated hospital. Fuller’s impact likewise persists.
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Kubrick’s Men doesn’t stoop to psychoanalyzing a director who was far smarter than most of his critics. He simply turns a very keen eye on the photography and the films. As such, this book may be of interest chiefly to Kubrick admirers. But even if Rambuss ends up merely wondering why the homosexuality is there, and even if one hasn’t seen all the movies discussed, this is a real labor of love.
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Center Center fabulously combines playfulness and profundity in telling the story of a talented, driven dancer who pursues life to the fullest and repeatedly asks: “Why Not?”
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Jaime Cortez’s new collection of short stories, Gordo, is set in this region’s agricultural worker camps in the 1970s. These are not fictionalized narratives of hardscrabble destitution but ebullient tales about the chubby, effeminate Gordo and his friends.
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THE PRICE OF DREAMS is a fictionalized autobiography of Patricia Highsmith, a translation from the Italian novel by Margherita Giacobino, structured with point-of-view changes in vignettes that move the narrative forward. The title is an allusion to Highsmith’s first novel, The Price of Salt …
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“WHO WOULD ever want to become a parent, if he knew every trouble ahead?” asks a character toward the end of Chinese-American writer Yang Huang’s new novel, My Good Son. The year is 1990, a year after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. …
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FIRST LOVE swirls at the center of Christopher Zyda’s memoir, The Storm, followed in short order by illness and death. The book recounts the fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1998, during which the promising UCLA English literature major who had “set my career sights on writing in Hollywood” meets and falls in love with 33-year-old Stephen, “a muscular man with brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a beautiful smile.” …
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WHAT HAPPENS when a gay American man and the heir to the British throne meet and fall in love? In Playing the Palace, Paul Rudnick makes full use of his comedic skills—evident in such screenplays as Jeffrey, Sister Act, and In and Out—to bring this improbable romance to life. …
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FIRST NOVELS, especially coming-out novels, arrive with a certain amount of baggage. I tend to open them with trepidation, prepared to be assaulted by clichés about the closet and bad sex. That’s why Justin Deabler’s first novel, Lone Stars, comes as a welcome surprise. Deabler avoids the traditional landmines of coming-out stories by working on a broader canvas. …
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