Bishop 2: The Lost Weeks
PARIS, 7 A.M. is a quietly striking novel that imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s first trip to Europe in 1937.
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Patsy’s Choice
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.
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A Filmmaker’s Final Words
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.
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‘The Bishop’
Reading Love Unknown is like touring Bishop’s word-ridden, complex, and stirring worlds. With an atlas and a book of her poems close by, it delivers a highly satisfying ride.
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Short Reviews
Short reviews of History’s Queer Stories, A Wild and Precious Life, and The Householders.
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The Art of Living in the Past
Peter McGough’s memoir I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going captures the silly, desperate decade they lived through and the peculiar ménage which is their major work of art.
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I Remember Mama
FROM the opening pages of this heart-felt memoir, Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, by Dustin Lance Black, we learn that it is not only a story about his life’s journey but also of his mother Anne and her remarkable life story.
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What Became of Elio and Oliver?
Gorgeously lyrical, unabashedly fanciful, Find Me is one of those delicious literary confections that turns out to be more than just a mess of empty calories. Witty, wise, breathtakingly elegant, Aciman’s novel ultimately tweaks the nose of Henry James and his arch, ironic tragedies, opting instead to embrace and celebrate the brave new world of Shakespearean romance.
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Before Auden and Isherwood
The manuscript of Poems Written Abroad was unearthed not long ago in a Midwestern university library and is printed here for the first time. It dates from the summer of 1927, when Spender was a mere eighteen years old.
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He Believed in the Power of Art
Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility. The book was compiled by Jamie Townsend, a Bay Area genderqueer poet who first encountered Abbott’s work when she was browsing in a bookstore in the Berkshires and picked up a copy of Stretching the Agape Bra, a collection of his poetry that includes “Elegy.”
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