May-June 2020
Aaron Smith is not exactly at the other end of the spectrum, but his work is far more flippant, colloquial, and funny. For example, the title poem, “The Book of Daniel,” refers not to the Bible but to the actor Daniel Craig, with whom the poet is apparently obsessed. Smith’s poems can be very risible indeed: …
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Reviews of Lot, The Animals at Lockwood Manor, Becoming Man, and Hollywood Chinese.
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Released in February, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan tells the story of two young gay men who are determined to defy parental and societal expectations and mold their own happily every afters.
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Set in Provincetown during the height of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s, Later is both a love letter to a place and an elegy for the people lost and for a way of life that can never quite be regained.
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Given this relative neglect of his work, Raymond-Jean Frontain’s new book, The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace, is especially welcome. The culmination of many years of study of McNally’s work and of his voluminous papers at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the book offers an insightful assessment of the playwright’s entire career. Frontain makes the best case yet for the unity of McNally’s body of work and for the significance of his achievement.
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WHO AMONG US has not wanted to see inside the lives of the most glamorous or intriguing stars of a bygone generation? In Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star, we get to know three such stars: Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong. The novel’s first three chapters alternate between their stories, which are denoted by the symbols Koe uses to mark shifts between characters throughout the book.
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What makes Carter Sickles’ new novel The Prettiest Star different is that it tells the story not only of Brian, a young man dying from AIDS, but also of his family and the suffering, discrimination, and harassment they went through.
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IN What Is the Grass, a dazzling and discursive meditation on Walt Whitman’s poetry, Mark Doty sets out to “see and say” all that his attention is drawn to—both the poetic and the personal—“lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase.”
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Robbins moved on to dance for the newly formed New York City Ballet, which, under George Balanchine, would soon outstrip the French and Russian schools to become the ballet company of the century. His idea for a contemporary Romeo and Juliet, with Bernstein composing again, opened in 1955 as West Side Story.
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In Toil & Trouble Burroughs writes that he has been a witch since birth and that he inherited his magical talents from his mentally ill mother, someone who has figured prominently in his other books. He doesn’t practice in a coven with other witches but works his magic solo, incanting and occasionally lighting candles to make things happen.
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