[Ethan Mordden’s] latest book, Anything Goes, far from being merely a rehash of his earlier works, offers the surest description to date of the roots and evolution of the musical, and represents Mordden’s own revised conclusions after almost forty years of considering these issues.
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THERE’S A REASON why Henry James burned his papers in the garden of Lamb House: when a famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People swoop in and write up his life, often in a way that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “pathobiography.”
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By all means check out The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray, especially if you’ve already read the original novel, or use it as an excuse to read The Picture of Dorian Gray if you haven’t.
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THIS ENGAGING STUDY investigates the many associations that have been drawn, in both literary works and historical events, between gay men, Jews, and communists as potential traitors and spies.
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IN HER LIFE, Liza Monroy confides in The Marriage Act, there have been three important men: her father, her boyfriend Julian, and her best friend Emir.
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Death in Venice, California is McCabe’s homage to Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella. Like Gustav von Aschenbach, Frame is an aging writer who finds himself facing a crisis of the spirit …
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THE PROJECT that finally became this book began as a web trail from the British Museum. It is a pictorial sampling of items from that museum across centuries and cultures of mostly visual representations of same-sex desire and gender ambiguity. Each depiction has a paragraph or two of explanation, much as you would find on the plaques that accompany art works in a museum exhibit. The items are arranged in roughly chronological order.
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Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home by Catherine Reid Beacon Press. 184 pages, $24.95 FOR THOSE OF US who grew up city-side, the idea of discovering…More
Carl van Vechten receives the copious and discriminating biographical analysis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker, an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book.
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EDITOR Nigel Simeone has selected some 650 letters for this collection of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence over a span of six decades of the 20th century. The first letter is from 1932, written by a fourteen-year-old Bernstein to his piano teacher, Helen Coates. The last is from 1990: a letter to conductor Georg Solti.
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