Important Artifacts …
By Leanne Shapton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 129 pages, $18
Have you ever rearranged your stuff before visitors arrived? Exchanged the lowbrow books on the night table for better ones, reconsidered the bibelots, removed some of the items from the medicine cabinet, and put out better kitchen towels? Knowing full well the Read More
Of all the Balanchine diaspora companies—that is, those headed by his artistic progeny or their offspring—the one most closely watched is the Miami City Ballet, whose artistic director is Edward Villella, the world’s original just-one-of-the-guys ballet dancer. Imagine the buoyant hoofing of Gene Kelly crossed with the macho wisecracking of the Rat Pack, throw in Read More
The Widows of Eastwick
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, 308 pages, $24.95
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. —Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The return of The Witches of Eastwick?
If only. John Updike’s weird sisters, returned now as widows, aren’t so much wicked Read More
WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company, 323 pages, $25
IF YOU GO about your daily rounds in New York carrying a copy of David Sedaris’ new book, you will be popular—besieged, even.
"Where did you get that? I pre-ordered it and I don’t have it yet!"
Along the Read More
Autobiography of a Wardrobe
By Elizabeth Kendall
Pantheon Books, 223 pages, $20
Elizabeth Kendall has written a memoir in the voice and guise of her own wardrobe. Individual garments, or outfits, star in each of her 47 short chapters, and then come an epilogue, an appendix—where to shop!—and a bibliography.
Only in the epilogue does Read More
I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE
By Sloane Crosley
Riverhead Books, 228 pages, $14
Okay, I confess. I Facebook-stalked Sloane Crosley, and she has some very cool friends, including Leon Neyfakh, who profiled her for The Observer (“The Most Popular Publicist in New York”—Nov. 27, 2007). So believe me, I was totally Read More
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
By Peter Carey
Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $24.95
Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, Read More
THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE
By Samantha Hunt
Houghton Mifflin, 257 pages, $24
In her second novel—the first was the very well-received The Seas (2005)—Samantha Hunt has used her quite singular voice to animate a crowd of characters. The Seas was more or less a work of magic realism, a very Read More
SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE
By Bill Bryson
Atlas/HarperCollins, 199 pages, $19.95
According to Bill Bryson, “The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. … The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a Read More
BORN STANDING UP: A COMIC’S LIFE
By Steve Martin
Scribner, 207 pages, $25
… Enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. —Steve Martin
Being funny isn’t fun. At the height of his great success as a stand-up comedian (crowds of 45,000), Steve Martin suffered from depression, exhaustion Read More
