Books Archive
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Toni
Posted on March 23, 2013 | 2 CommentsThese photographs are by Jill Krementz, and were taken of the author Toni Morrison while she was an editor at Random House, in the nineteen-seventies. On Fridays, the esteemed author taught a class at Yale, in the African-American studies department... -
Dick
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsOh, for the love of Richard Burton! I don’t mean the jewels, the private planes and yachts that he showered onto his most public love, Elizabeth Taylor, but the sheer luminous lust of him, and the language! In his rollicking, brilliant “Diaries,”... -
Arbus Speaks
Posted on September 28, 2011 | No CommentsWhen I first heard Diane Arbus’s voice, I felt as if I’d known it all along. It’s a voice that’s as singular as her pictures, girlish and definite in tone, a voice that conveys in its lovely trills and reasonableness... -
Modesty: Lydia Davis and Duro Olowu
Posted on September 27, 2011 | No CommentsLydia Davis writes stories whose central plot point is the very act of thinking. In a small and beautiful chapbook called “The Cows” (2001) she describes a field with cows across the street from her house near Pittsville, in upstate... -
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
Posted on August 19, 2011 | No CommentsI started to read when I was about ten years old. I didn’t read children’s books, or fairy tales. I read books that were available to me, which is to say books that were assigned to me in English class... -
Style and Jane Bowles
Posted on July 19, 2011 | No CommentsDiana Vreeland once described style by saying “It helps you get down the stairs.” What if you have to get down the stairs with a limp? The brilliant Jane Bowles (1917–1973) walked with a limp–the result of a teenage illness....
