Article Archive for February 2011
The Muse of Trouville
‘She’s a drug; I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.’ Victoria Best explores the fraught relationship between Marguerite Duras and the young man whose love inspired and tormented her.
Squid Pro Quo
Matt Taibbi is the foremost political-writing muckraker of his generation, matching an acerbic wit with a pressure-cooked prose style. But is there substance behind the bluster?
The Greatness that was Downton
Julian Fellowes’ “Downton Abbey” was shot in a castle, but it may have a nearer relationship to “Mad Men” than “Brideshead Revisited.” Joanna Scutts tracks the evolution of the British costume drama.
Learning to Read Perfume: A Talk with Chandler Burr
Our poet of perfume and the curator of the brand new Center of Olfactory Art discuss why perfumes demand to be smelled and why “perfume is the only art form in which Americans are more illiterate than poetry.”
History Without the Moon
Her reign was epic in length and social impact, but it very nearly didn’t happen at all. She ruled through two generations of her people, and she left the British monarchy very different from how she found it. She is Queen Victoria, and our Year with the Windsors starts as it must: with her.
A Woman of High Courage
For nearly three decades, Sara Paretsky has used the familiar form of the private eye novel to turn a critical eye on contemporary America. Rohan Maitzen reviews the latest in her V.I. Warshawski series.
About Poems
“The family got the majority of their ideas about families from black and white films. They tried to replicate every important detail exactly”
Dross of a Passing Dream
A conversation with Open Letters’ new curator, Katie Caron, and an exploration of her upcoming show, “Displaced”
It’s a Mystery: “As My Whimsy Takes Me”
“The Attenbury Emeralds” is the third novel by Jill Paton Walsh to bring Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane, Mervyn Bunter, and their companions back to vividly realized life.
There Can Only Be One
The United States’ first Civil War, Alan Taylor claims, was fought in 1812. Ivan Lett assesses the revisionist argument.
A Visit from the Prince
You think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble… Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham’s paradoxical new novel “By Nightfall”.
Still Hoping for Her Close-Up
Molly Allgood was only a young, up-and-coming actress when her fiance J.M. Synge died of cancer. Joseph O’Connor’s novel “The Ghost Light” imagines how the rest of her life played out in the shadow of that loss.
Oh, Henry
Patrick Henry uttered one of the most famous lines in American history, and a new biography attempts to claim him for a particular radical strain of popularism in contemporary politics. Give me liberty or give me… historical distortion?
One Common Reader
Virginia Woolf imagined the Almighty seeing us coming towards Paradise, books in hand: “We have nothing to give them, they have loved reading.” But does reading always bring salvation?
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