FRANCES BINGHAM has written a biography that reads like an Iris Murdoch novel, specifically A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It’s a moving portrait of the life of British poet Valentine Ackland (1906–1969), but it’s also about her longtime companion Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), an accomplished novelist and poet.
More
Reviews of MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, A DUTIFUL BOY: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance, BEFORE STONEWALL, THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH, and RELEASED FROM THE WHEEL.
MoreJAMES MERRILL (1926–1995) was one of the most honored and admired American poets of the second half of the 20th century. As Stephen Yenser puts it in the introduction to A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, Merrill was “different from both his debonair contemporaries in the New York School and the more theatrical and publicized ‘confessional’ poets.”
More
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.
More
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.
More
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.
More
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?”
More
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.
More
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 …
More
“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. …
More
