Literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store
Andrew Osborne
It was sometime after the man in the mushroom cap sang a song about earwigs yet well before Werner Herzog's nihilistic re-imagining of "The Wizard of Oz" that I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Instead, I was sequestered ...
Toba Singer
Susan Neiman offers a materialist analysis of the contemporary catechism of child rearing and the glorification of childhood. Bring a child into the world, and you have given birth not just to a human ...
Toba Singer
“Skylight,” by José Saramago, one of his first works, written in 1953 (and rejected) when the author was in his early thirties, was published posthumously last year, and has consequently become something of a curio. One can rush ...
Lewis Whittington
In his New York Times op-eds, Charles Blow sometimes single-mindedly elevates discourse of volatile topics to sane discussion. He punctures long held cultural narratives about race, religion, politics, poverty, class, gender, sexuality. Now, in his first book "Fire ...
Nancy S. BishopChicago,
Lahr and Martha Lavey, "Steppenwolf" artistic director, were seated on a stage dressed for the cluttered Irish bachelor-hoarder’s apartment for the current Steppenwolf production, Conor McPherson’s "The Night Alive." Lavey was prepared with her own advance copy of the book ...
Michael Wade Simpson
Richard Haddaway’s 30 years in the newspaper business might have prepared him for some kind of hard-boiled post-career nonfiction writing—some kind of book hardened by the cynicism that is the stock in trade of daily journalism. Instead, his new novel, ...
Lewis Whittington
Sean Strub’s resume includes being an entrepreneur and failed congressional candidate, but his biggest achievements are as an AIDS activist. A longtime HIV-AIDS survivor, Strub founded ...
Tim Teeman's exposé has plenty of revelations, including some about Vidal's truly intimate side.
Lewis Whittington
The Times of London correspondent Tim Teeman knew Gore Vidal as the aging literary lion in winter, a brilliant novelist of "Burr" and "The City and the Pillar," living in semi-exile and harboring lifelong resentments. Teeman’s respect for ...
The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen, and the Revolution
Michael Wade Simpson
One of the final humiliations Marie Antoinette suffered, after languishing in a filthy prison cell, waiting for her execution, was to have her hair chopped off in order to offer a clean surface for the blade of the guillotine. Practical ...
Lewis Whittington
Ray of Light and Dark
“Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director”By Patrick McGilligan560 pages, $30Harper PerennialJuly, 2011
By the time Nicholas Ray directed "Rebel Without a Cause," he was one of the most accomplished ...
