South American Journals, edited by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, is one of those big important historical documents. Scholars of the Beats and lovers of Ginsberg will find much rich ore to mine here for years to come.
More
“The Decay of Lying” was as much a critique of the realism of Victorian literature as it was an argument for the pleasure of artifice in art. For Vivian, the beauty of artifice was precisely what gave art its power. But what of the artist himself? What becomes of literary forgeries, imitations, and outright faked manuscripts when we consider Wilde’s notion of art’s beautiful lies?
This is the question that Gregory Mackie takes up in his deeply researched and entertaining book …
More
THE CENTRAL THESIS of Public City/Public Sex is an interesting and original one. Andrew Israel Ross argues that the attention to and interdiction of men seeking sex with other men in 19th-century Paris …
More
Moser is the most damning of Sontag with respect to her insistent avoidance or denial of her sexual orientation. As the author of Notes on Camp (1964), she displayed an intimate knowledge of gay life that no heterosexual at this time is likely to have had. Later on, although her lesbian affairs were an open secret, …
More
Greenwell’s prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator’s first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions.
More
A letter from Mrs. Smith closes the collection, like a Greek chorus commenting on the tragedy. “I am glad you agree with me that we must not grieve for our friend,” she writes to Porter’s friend Jean Howard after he died in 1964, “for he will never have to suffer again. This is the end of an Era. Three great and good men have left the Waldorf now: General MacArthur, Cole Porter, and Herbert Hoover, this year.”
Only in America.
More
IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was “very much a work in progress”: most of its roads were muddy mires, neighborhoods were far apart by horseback, and much of the city sat in a genuine swamp to which most Congressmen had to travel from far away. In Bosom Friends, Balcerski conveys the roughness of the city in you-are-there detail …
More
PARIS, 7 A.M. is a quietly striking novel that imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s first trip to Europe in 1937.
More
WHEN we first encounter the title character of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s intergenerational family saga, Patsy, she’s standing in line outside the U.S. embassy in Jamaica, dreaming of America. The year is 1998.
More
CHANTAL AKERMAN’S memoir My Mother Laughs is similar to her films: layered, defying time and space, concerned with the quotidian. Her work is woman-centered, often lesbian-centered, and focused on describing the position of women in society, including how the oppressive forces of patriarchy inflict both physical and emotional trauma on women.
More
