Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography in which Perry expresses her feelings of oneness with Hansberry through similarities in their backgrounds and reactions to political events. The book also offers critiques of many of Hansberry’s works, both published and unpublished.
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Berenice Abbott remains a major influence in photography today. Her work is visually breathtaking—immediate, clear, and indelible. Van Haaften has written a book that’s a major resource for fans of urban and architectural photography.
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The description of the fire, pieced together bit by bit from interviews with survivors and archival research, is so painstakingly done that it’s hard to read. AIDS, in the next decade, was a horrifying shock; but in this fire there was no time to process one’s fate or come to terms with death, much less bargain with it, or try out medicines; it all happened in an instant …
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Jeremy Mulderig claims in his introduction that The Lost Autobiography is one of the great queer diaries of the 20th century (one wonders how many of these there actually are; still, the claim does not seem wildly off base). Here is a witness to some of that century’s great personalities, living defiantly through the strictures imposed by society during those times, and asserting at every turn that he had as much right to be happy as anyone else.
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ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended from apes was on everyone’s mind.
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Calypso by David Sedaris Little, Brown. 259 pages, $28. OF COURSE the book is funny; it’s by David Sedaris. We’ve known this about Sedaris since the morning of…More
Uglow’s portrait of Lear is intricate and sympathetic, and her analysis of his creative achievements sharp. She is informative about English society and culture in the 19th century, as well as events that were happening abroad. If Mr. Lear is short on details of the nonsense writer’s private life, it seems only in keeping with his exquisite perception of boundaries.
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Gillian Rodger’s Just One of the Boys is a welcome and fascinating addition to the history of cross-dressed performance and 19th-century Anglo-American theater more generally.
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Set mostly in the Delta region of Mississippi where [Nick] White was born and raised, the collection (Sweet & Low) is divided into two sections. In a story in the first section, “The Lovers,” a widow slowly realizes the truth about her husband’s secret life after she discovers an unrecognizable pocket watch among her husband’s belongings. …
The stories in the second section are interlinked, focusing on the life of one Forney Culpepper, who matures from childhood to early middle age over the course of six varied and finely crafted stories.
Nicola Griffith’s new novel So Lucky, a slim book about the progress of a little-understood chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, seems unexpectedly narrow in scope when compared to previous efforts. However, the subject matter is partly autobiographical.
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