A LIFE OF PICASSO: THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS, 1917-1932
By John Richardson
Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages, $40
In this, the third installment of John Richardson’s epic biography of Picasso, we find that the artist, age 36, having been spurned by two mistresses to whom he’d proposed marriage, has fled wartime Paris for Read More
NUREYEV: THE LIFE
By Julie Kavanagh
Pantheon, 800 pages, $37.50
“I will never return to my country, but I truly believe that I will never be happy in yours.”
—Rudolf Nureyev
Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life initially came to me in “galleys”—that is, a Read More
THE HEADMASTER’S DILEMMA
By Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $25
Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction. Many were written while he was a Read More
DEATH OF A MURDERER
By Rupert Thomson
Alfred A. Knopf, 226 pages, $23
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Rupert Thomson’s serenely eerie, Read More
In October 1960, Lincoln Kirstein “was able to confide to a few people that the state would be spending $17,500,000 to erect a dance theater. It would be designed by Philip Johnson and seat twenty-six hundred people.” This building would become the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. “It had, astonishingly, happened,” Read More
Part pooh-bah, part pontiff, for some 50 years Leo Lerman ruled Manhattan’s cultural roost from a host of journalistic redoubts, including Mademoiselle, Vogue and Vanity Fair, ending his career as an über-editorial advisor at Condé Nast Publications. He died at 80 on Aug. 22, 1994. The ultimate first-nighter, he apparently never missed the opening of Read More
Memoir, cultural history, biography; choreographic catalogue raisonné, guide to dance technique, performance diary; discourse on chance, aleatory procedures and open form; romance, philosophical meditation and more: Carolyn Brown has written not one book, but books and books, all bound together by her clear and graceful voice, which echoes her clear and graceful self.
The complex, Read More
