July-August 2015
In the first chapter of The Sexuality of History—a play on Michel Foucault’s famous title, The History of Sexuality—Susan S. Lanser argues that the basic trappings of modern Western civilization, everything from eating with forks to the “rights of man,” first appeared in the 1600s and have been developing since then.
More“ARCTIC SUMMER,” the title of an unfinished novel by E. M. Forster, well suits this fictional biography of the English writer. It’s hard to imagine a writer further…More
Flanagan provides deft plot summaries and sensitive readings of Mishima’s fiction and deploys a wide array of Japanese sources currently unavailable in English, producing a rich portrait of this very strange and complicated man. As Flanagan tells it, Mishima’s life was one long, extreme, calculated performance, and that assessment seems apt. It’s a performance that, 45 years later, continues to reverberate in Japan, and beyond.
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Every visitor to the Fire Island Pines should leave with a sense that they entered a world different from “mainstream” America for myriad reasons, not the least of which was…More
My Huckleberry Friend: The relocated Whitney Museum opened in Manhattan last May in a blaze of glory, but not without a note of disharmony when a sculpture that had been commissioned…More
Why So Easy on Gore Vidal? To the Editor: After reading Andrew Holleran’s review [May-June issue] of Michael Mewshaw’s memoir, Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with…More
IN A NATIONAL REFERENDUM on May 22, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, not by judicial or legislative action, but by a popular vote.…More
THE CURATOR of the recent show Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York (Feb. 13–May 3, 2015), Jennifer Tyburczy is an art historian whose…More
DURING THE MANY 25th anniversary celebrations of the Stonewall Riots in 1994, I was somewhat surprised to hear so many people saying they had been there that night in…More
WHEN I MOVED to New York after college in the summer of 1980 to find a job in publishing, I took regular breaks from my daily search at a…More
