Strange Man in a Strange Land
THE TITLE of Declaring His Genius refers to Oscar Wilde’s notorious remark upon landing in New York in 1882 (“I have nothing to declare but my genius”).
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Rise and Fall of a One-Hit Wunderkind
A significant portion of the correspondence reveals that his stint in the army was positively “dreadful”—a word repurposed by Burns to mean “homosexual.” Margolick provides enough war correspondence to justify his claim that Burns was an important chronicler of gay life in the military.
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In a Yellow Loo
How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits, a collection of essays, has a theme: the sin of non-communication.
MoreInto Thick Walls
IMAGINE your spouse, partner, lover goes out for a walk one evening and never comes back. The police are called, you tell them your story, and nobody is to be found. What would you do?
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What Happened to Him as a Child?
The publication of Francis Bacon: Five Decades coincides with its exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of the artist’s death.
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The Dresser
WHILE ostensibly telling the story of the great fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mary Blume offers a wider view of the French fashion scene and larger social significance—wider, perhaps, than some might think it deserves.
MoreThe Freedom Fighters’ Historian
THIS COMPENDIUM of Martin Duberman’s published writings has funneled into a single volume samples from an œuvre that includes some twenty books and numerous essays written over a period of some fifty years. The result of this distillation is a volume of 26 essays described in the book’s subtitle as “the essential historical, biographical, and autobiographical writings” of the author.
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Beyond the Celluloid Closet
Rich’s anthology is undoubtedly essential reading for GLBT cinephiles. For younger film students (straight, gay, or questioning) it sets the historical scene impeccably. For those of us who were there—and I was working as a film critic and graduate student through much of the period Rich writes about—this book creates a bizarre sense of nostalgia.
MoreThe Rite of Winter
IGOR STRAVINSKY’S Perséphone is one of the least understood works in the history of contemporary dance, music, and theater. Tamara Levitz’ Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone presents a hot, bubbling stew of Uranism, naked boys, golden torches, pédérastie, and Sapphist resistance.
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Letters We Were Never Meant to Read
One cannot help but be impressed by the number of Will Cather’s letters that survived despite such a determined effort to secure their destruction. But the 564 letters published here represent only about twenty percent of the entire body of rescued letters.
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