Bob Wake
Fifteen years ago, Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line famously resulted in freeing an innocent man from prison. Last year, in what is arguably a comparable turn of events, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary Stone Reader rescued a forgotten American ...
Nancy Chapple
Joan Didion’s The White Album was first published in 1979 and can be considered a follow-up to her Slouching Towards Bethlehem published 11 years earlier. It consists of 20 essays arranged in five sections, including one about California phenomena, ...
Nancy Chapple
Jane Juska’s first book is a memoir that takes as its starting point what happened when she placed an ad in The New York Review of Books seeking to "have a lot of sex with a man I like." ...
Kendal Butler
The Something Might Happen in the title of Julie Myerson’s bleak, haunting not-quite-whodunit seems at first already to have happened: a woman named Lennie has been grotesquely murdered in a seaside village in Suffolk and the police have been ...
Kendal Butler
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth comes from the mouth of British movie director Ronald Neame, filtered through the pen of ghostwriter Barbara Roisman Cooper, who “specializes in creating celebrity profiles for various publications, including British Heritage, Biblio Magazine, and ...
David Fear
The phrase “new Hollywood cinema” is an ambiguous designation for a town that repeatedly reinvents and rejuvenates itself. It’s often applied to two closely-related – but very distinct – time periods. One is the late 1960's-to-mid-1970's, now known as ...
Nancy Chapple
Does the narrator of a memoir need to be likeable? What if he’s particularly unsympathetic? What if the life he describes is so very different from your own that you can only shake your head in amazement? Augusten ...
Lewis Whittington
If James Gavin's biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker was fiction, it would have a shot at being the great American novel. The bootstrap story of a poor trumpeter (with missing teeth) who couldn’t ...
Lewis Whittington
One of the most fertile partnerships in all of ballet wasn't seen on stage, but was danced behind the scenes - the collaboration of composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer George Balanchine. Both Russian artistic emigres to the West, together ...
David Fear
The term “screwball comedy” is one of those genre labels that, like film noir, seems to be applied as loosely as it is frequently. Once upon a time, “screwball” denoted a very specific type of film from a very ...
