PS1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
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Feature
Page-Turner at The New Yorker, July 1 2014. Uncovering the story of Ted Peckham and his thriving male-escort service in 1930s New York.
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Feature
Poets & Writers, May/June 2014. With their new magazine, Scratch, Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin are busting through the last literary taboo: money.
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Book Review
THE STEADY RUNNING OF THE HOUR, by Justin Go. “The plot, with its combination of world war, doomed romance and exotic locations, seems designed to catch the attention of Hollywood producers in search of another “English Patient.”
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Interview
BARBARA EHRENREICH, author of “Living with a Wild God”. “It’s rare to come across a memoir, perhaps especially by a woman writer, that is so much more focused on a philosophical coming of age than with emotional or sexual discovery.”
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Book Review
THE SCARLET SISTERS, by Myra MacPherson. “MacPherson hammers home the point that, even in 2014, powerful men treat women’s bodies as political bargaining chips. These Victorian sisters’ blast of protest against a restrictive and hypocritical status quo remains something to celebrate.”
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Feature
THE GREAT WAR, By Joe Sacco. The panorama darkens as we move from behind-the-lines activity to the combat zone, from preparations to attack: a dark-grey wash marks nightfall, with small white patches picking out candlelit dugouts and distant explosions.
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Book Review
CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Churchwell. It is art that eases our frustrations with a plot in which the “careless” escape and the dreamers are cut down, and it is to art that we are left wanting, ceaselessly, to return.
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Feature
THE ART GENOME PROJECT. At first glance, Artsy.net looks like the minimalist homepage of a wealthy museum. But it’s what you can’t see—how the images are categorised and organised—that sets the site apart.
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Book Review
THE HEIR APPARENT, by Jane Ridley. It’s hard not to see parallels between Bertie’s fate and that of his great-great-grandson Prince Charles, now 65: to spend adult life searching for something to do while waiting for Mother to die.
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Book Review
BOOK OF AGES, by Jill Lepore. This luminous story of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister is stitched together from fragments and scraps, a life’s “remains”: literature and descendants.
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Interview
JESMYN WARD, author of “Men We Reaped.” “Part of what I’m trying to accomplish in the book is to shock people out of their complacency.”
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Review Essay
SPARTA, by Roxana Robinson. The unit fragments and the soldier finds himself alone, more deeply alone than he was before he enlisted, more alone than he has ever been.
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Feature
THE UNWINDING, by George Packer. If there is hope in these stories, it lies in the resilience of the ordinary characters Packer writes about with empathy, patience, and respect—in what he calls “the ability of people to survive in the middle of strong winds blowing.”
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Book Review
SHRAPNEL by William Wharton. Shrapnel wounds haphazardly—it can glance off the surface or lodge deep in the body. In William Wharton’s World War II memoir, it becomes a metaphor for the war’s psychic impact.
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Feature
ON MARJORIE HILLIS. “Live Alone and Like It” is a brisk and bracing self-help guide for women who, by choice or accident, find themselves “settling down to a solitary existence.”
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Interview
CARL ROLLYSON, author of “American Isis.” “I realized right at the beginning that there was no way that the Plath estate – especially given my point of view – would cooperate with me.”
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Interview
JEANNE THEOHARIS, author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” “Our extremely limited history of Parks reveals our investment in the popular myths of the civil rights movement: the fable of the quiet seamstress doesn’t ask anything of us.”
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Interview
STEPHANIE LACAVA, author of “An Extraordinary Theory of Objects.” “You should see the boxes I have of paper scraps, notebook pages, antique postcards, buttons, old ribbon, jewelry — all part of my obsession with objects.”
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Review Essay
ON DIANA VREELAND. The legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue expanded the definition of “fashion” and pushed it to the center of culture.
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Book Review
THE BLACK COUNT, by Tom Reiss. On being told that God had taken the man he idolized, little Alexandre shouldered one of his father’s guns and announced that he was going to heaven “to kill God, who killed Daddy.”
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Book Review
TOBY’S ROOM, by Pat Barker. The dual explosion of sex and death within the superficially tranquil home is a familiar theme for Barker, in whose novels the past lays detonating charges along the paths of characters’ lives.
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Interview
BENJAMIN ANASTAS, author of “Too Good to be True.” “I do think there’s a cautionary tale for young writers wrapped up in the story of how I lost my way, even if the mistakes I made are all my own.”
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Book Review
CEZANNE: A LIFE, by Alex Danchev. Cézanne looked at the world by looking at the objects, sitter, or landscape in front of him, and was entirely consumed by the struggle to understand it through his brushstrokes, colors, lines, and planes.
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Book Review
ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Alison Bechdel. In her quiet, rigorous, self-deprecating way, she succeeds in creating a world in which we are bound to recognize some part of ourselves—and our mothers.
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Interview
JOHN BOYNE, author of “The Absolutist.” “A lot of conscientious objectors would do some work on farms, or in field hospitals, or were made to be stretcher-bearers. But there was this small group of people, absolutists, who wouldn’t do anything.”
JOANNA SCUTTS 