recent posts
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Authors
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One of the many revelations in Jeff Feuerzeig’s riveting documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story, was that Laura Albert, the mastermind behind her fictive persona JT LeRoy, an author of some renown, also worked with director Gus Van Sant on his 2003 Elephant, a movie of a Columbine-like mass shooting at a school. She was…
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What is beat? From down and out through saintly beatitudes, beat is an attitude. As a literary movement, the Beat Generation is an American phenomenon, but every geographic area that experienced it, takes ownership, and the French are no different. In Paris, at Centre Pompidou’s 6th floor neighboring a retrospective of Paul Klee, a vast…
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Two Joans were on display at Christie’s on June 16, one was the much-missed Joan Rivers with a sampling of her sequined gowns adorning mannequins in the auction house entrance, going on the block the following day. The other was the famed subject of a 1950 letter to Jack Kerouac from his pal, Neal Cassady, long…
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The patron saint of smart New York women, Nora Ephron is sorely missed. We have not seen her like since 2012 when she died at age 71 of pneumonia and leukemia. Not that you could refashion her particular savvy, audacity, and wit. Now her son Jacob Bernstein has made a film about her, Everything is…
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Photo: Paula Schwartz Sunday night’s Superbowl may have been the focus for a majority of Americans, but a rival event took place at Caroline’s Comedy Club, with Jane Fonda as M. C., introduced by Gloria Steinem. Calling herself a quintessential late bloomer to feminism, Jane Fonda recalled that she really did not understand what it…
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I was a huge Bowie fan back in day, which made it really strange that I did not recognize him when I met him backstage at The Bottom Line during a Steve Reich and his 18 Musicians concert. This light haired, well-groomed guy stood there in an argyle vest and pegged pants. Maybe I was…
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On screen Bill Pullman is that guy, rarely first choice for the girl, but you spend a lot of watching wondering exactly why not: see Sleepless in Seattle, or While You Were Sleeping; he comes late, back from the war, in the movie A League of their Own, and Geena Davis leaves baseball for his…
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A master storyteller in the tradition of medieval balladeers, Sting recounted a childhood experience at a celebration this week of his The Last Ship from the River of the Northern City, a handcrafted boxed edition of his Last Ship lyrics with woodcuts by “luminist” painter Stephen Hannock, published by Two Ponds Press. Growing up in…
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Last week, at Guild Hall’s series, “Stirring the Pot,” featuring conversations with “culinary celebrities,” Geoffrey Zakarian was not expecting to talk politics. Florence Fabricant, New York Times food writer, author of several cookbooks including Park Avenue Pot Luck, a compilation of recipes from friends, and host of this entertaining series—next up Dr. Oz and Lisa…
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High profile authors like Nelson DeMille, Dick Cavett and Dr. Ruth Westheimer had stacks of books to sell under the Authors Night tent. Not surprising, the longest line was for author Ed Burns, yes that Ed Burns. The cover of this week’s Hamptons Magazine, creator of a new television series, Public Morals, for TNT, and…
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By 1996, upon the publication of the gargantuan novel Infinite Jest, its author David Foster Wallace was the envy of writers. Touted in exalted ways, praised as brilliant, his work produced an “anxiety of influence” for the literary. The Rolling Stone reporter, novelist David Lipsky, asked editor-in-chief Jann Wenner to assign him to accompany Wallace…
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When I heard that Billy Collins would give a reading at Guild Hall, I wanted to talk to the U. S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003). I caught up with him in transit. I hope I’m not interrupting anything. I am on the way to the dentist, so figure I have just a few minutes. I just…
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A Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow, jazzman Ornette Coleman died this week at age 85. Ornette Coleman’s extraordinary career as an alto saxophone performer dovetailed with several poetry movements in America including his friendship and collaborations with the Beat Generation writers. He made the soundtracks on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), based on William…
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In 1997, the last year of his life, poet Allen Ginsberg fretted that the first amendment battles won over his iconic epic Howl, would now face a reversal. Howl had been read on Pacifica radio, and censors now wanted to confine those readings till late night, lest innocent ears be compromised. Backtrack to 1955, the…
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Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, the famed memoir of the author’s time as a nurse during World War I, is now a major motion picture perfectly poised for summer. Leave it to David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter films, to put this book on screen. Heyman seems to specialize in coming of age…
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Playwright Mike Poulton spoke to a British contingent at the Morgan Library last week about adapting Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall, for the stage. Tony-nominated Wolf Hall, parts I and II, about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, his wives and politics, is now wowing audiences at the Winter Garden Theater. Poulton said he…
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The musical based on that Russian classic Doctor Zhivago inevitably evokes comparisons with the Omar Shariff-Julie Christie, David Lean 1965 movie, from Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel. A Broadway show with name recognition, Doctor Zhivago has played in Australia and South Korea—in Korean—and was much loved. Given its politics, that’s a coup. Les Miserables Russian style,…
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La Grenouille experienced a British invasion yesterday for a lunch celebrating the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s beloved 19th century novel. Carey Mulligan, currently starring in Skylight on Broadway, plays Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed and occasionally wrong-headed heroine, a pre-feminist, you could call her. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts portrays Gabriel…
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You may remember Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty in Walter Salles’ On the Road. The Minnesota-born actor played the character inspired by the famed fast talking fast driving, Neal Cassady, son of a Denver wino in the movie based on Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel. During his time in New York doing publicity for Salles’ 2012…
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Back in the day, Susan Sontag was the big anxiety of influence. Public intellectual, essayist, activist, provocateur, critic, and novelist, she was the giant thinker to topple for any woman. Few could claim her intellectual maternity. “I feel sorry for you,” said one male professor to the women in his class, as if we were…
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In his long dynamic career, Bob Hope’s story resonates as a cultural history of the last decade: a rags-to-riches immigrant, he was a pioneer in vaudeville, inventing stand up as we know it: he worked in movies and on television, and entertained the troops abroad. Not only was his profile, a ski slope nose, a…
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Famed and multi-awarded neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper, author of the definitive textbook on clinical neurology, with the help of Brian David Burrell, has turned his prodigious medical knowledge to us, the people, with an entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns…
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Burroughs: The Movie opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live. The actress/ model Lauren Hutton introduces William S. Burroughs, proclaiming him the greatest living American writer, in her view. That last qualifier had to be included so that it would not look like a hoax, SNL’s music director Hal Willner told me last night…
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Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable…
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At Guild Hall, when Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain at a recent Q&A, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans have not been there, and I seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. This celebrity food maven sniffs out countries of smelly dysfunction…
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