Important Artifacts …By Leanne ShaptonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 129 pages, $18Have you ever rearranged your stuff before visitors arrived? Exchanged the lowbrow books on the night table for better ones, reconsidered the bibelots, removed some of the items from the medicine cabinet, and put out better kitchen towels? Knowing full well the detecting habits of Read More
Of all the Balanchine diaspora companies—that is, those headed by his artistic progeny or their offspring—the one most closely watched is the Miami City Ballet, whose artistic director is Edward Villella, the world’s original just-one-of-the-guys ballet dancer. Imagine the buoyant hoofing of Gene Kelly crossed with the macho wisecracking of the Rat Pack, throw in Read More
By the pricking of my thumbs,Something wicked this way comes. —Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The return of The Witches of Eastwick?
If only. John Updike’s weird sisters, returned now as widows, aren’t so much wicked as weary, and wearying.
And yet Updike Read More
IF YOU GO about your daily rounds in New York carrying a copy of David Sedaris’ new book, you will be popular—besieged, even.
"Where did you get that? I pre-ordered it and I don’t have it yet!"
Along the way—having promised to lend the Read More
Elizabeth Kendall has written a memoir in the voice and guise of her own wardrobe. Individual garments, or outfits, star in each of her 47 short chapters, and then come an epilogue, an appendix—where to shop!—and a bibliography.
Only in the epilogue does the writer I know Read More
Okay, I confess. I Facebook-stalked Sloane Crosley, and she has some very cool friends, including Leon Neyfakh, who profiled her for The Observer (“The Most Popular Publicist in New York”—Nov. 27, 2007). So believe me, I was totally psyched not Read More
Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, and then Read More
In her second novel—the first was the very well-received The Seas (2005)—Samantha Hunt has used her quite singular voice to animate a crowd of characters. The Seas was more or less a work of magic realism, a very grim fairy Read More
According to Bill Bryson, “The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. … The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day.” Yet here’s Read More
… Enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. —Steve Martin
Being funny isn’t fun. At the height of his great success as a stand-up comedian (crowds of 45,000), Steve Martin suffered from depression, exhaustion and the Read More
In this, the third installment of John Richardson’s epic biography of Picasso, we find that the artist, age 36, having been spurned by two mistresses to whom he’d proposed marriage, has fled wartime Paris for Rome and fallen Read More
“I will never return to my country, but I truly believe that I will never be happy in yours.”
—Rudolf Nureyev
Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life initially came to me in “galleys”—that is, a reviewer’s copy, Read More
Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction. Many were written while he was a partner of Read More
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Rupert Thomson’s serenely eerie, trans-genre eighth Read More
In October 1960, Lincoln Kirstein “was able to confide to a few people that the state would be spending $17,500,000 to erect a dance theater. It would be designed by Philip Johnson and seat twenty-six hundred people.” This building would become the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. “It had, astonishingly, happened,” writes Read More
