In the beginning, phones were communal. If you lived in a small enough town and the operator liked you, you knew everybody’s business. In the city, you knew the intimate goings-on of everybody who shared your party line. A long-distance call was communal, too, everybody gathering around the phone, as thrilled as […]
I am trying to understand Clarice Lispector, which is a doomed project, as I am not sure she even understood herself. She could be as coldly lucid as T.S. Eliot, as moody and self-indulgent as Anaïs Nin with PMS. Born in 1920 to a Jewish family that fled Ukraine two years […]
“I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention.” —Montaigne We called him Cowboy, and he wore the hat and talked the lingo and slid a gun into his drawer in the newsroom office. Which brought a few eye rolls, but in time, he grew on us, […]
With a big grin spread across his cherubic, bearded face, Paul Schoomer looked like a Jewish Santa Claus. Instead of carrying a sack of toys, he would fill a shopping bag with books you did not know you needed. Serious books. Sure, Paul’s Books offered best-sellers, coffee-table tomes, and children’s books, but […]
“I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Gent,” Queen Elizabeth said chattily to the president of France. “Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,” and she took up her soup spoon, “was he as good?” That bit of dialogue […]
“Write what you know,” the old saw buzzes, setting my teeth on edge. Where is the fun in that? The stuff I already know is the stuff I mutter when somebody falls short. This is not an attractive trait. Even fiction should be an exploration, it seems to me, and your characters […]
The new film Till takes us back to the lynching of an innocent fourteen-year-old and the maternal outrage that lit a match to the civil rights movement. Percival Everett’s riveting new novel The Trees, funny as hell and just as fierce, uses the same piece of history to torch the bigotry that […]
As a baby, Joan Strassmann heard the sweet chirps of house sparrows nesting beneath the eaves. As a child, she spotted birds on hikes with her father, a German refugee and outdoor enthusiast. Once armed with her own binoculars, she was startled by the electric blue of an indigo bunting. And when […]
The much-anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, sequel to the wildly successful Black Panther (2018) is not a good film. First, it is too long. At two-and-a-half hours, this bloated spectacle feels labored and poorly conceived. Movies of this sort, action-laden and loaded with special effects, that are long (over two hours) generally […]
This little tidbit about a series of cholera outbreaks in Cleveland only caught my attention because of the city, not the illness. For some reason, I have bumped into Cleveland a lot this fall semester in a graduate class I am teaching on African American autobiography. William Wells Brown, the St. […]
