Did you notice how awful the Times was to David Blaine today? The stunning end to his marine marathon at Lincoln Center got winked off in the Arts section, while Dan Barry in his Metro section column (sorry—Times Select) seemed to say that Blaine was responsible for blowing up soldiers in Read More
This is a book that people will find cute and charming—or it’s a book they’ll find cloying and false and illiterate. Since it comes garlanded in endorsements from accomplished writers and a movie star, too (Lucinda Rosenfeld, Nell Freudenberger, Sam Lipsyte—and Claire Danes), I expect many reviewers to go for option No. 1 and Read More
This is a book that people will find cute and charming—or it’s a book they’ll find cloying and false and illiterate. Since it comes garlanded in endorsements from accomplished writers and a movie star, too (Lucinda Rosenfeld, Nell Freudenberger, Sam Lipsyte—and Claire Danes), I expect many reviewers to go for option No. 1 and not Read More
The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright , by Jean Nathan. Henry Holt, 320 pages, $25.
Just about every woman in New York City at some point secretly fears that she’s going to wind up alone, alcoholic and jabbering to herself in a dark one-bedroom apartment, having devoted the Read More
The Afterword , by Mike Bryan. Pantheon, 195 pages, $16.
Ye gods, not another novel with footnotes. Not yet another metafiction, the writer writing while gazing at himself as he writes. Not another quasi-autobiographical offering laden with irony.
Well, yes. But Mike Bryan’s The Afterword is somewhat different from the usual 21st-century meta-icons. First, Read More
Welcome to the second and final installment of “Unscathed
Broads,” my probing tribute to the gutsy, hand-bag-swinging chutzpah of the
collective New York psyche. Last week, we put Susanne Bartsch-party-promoter,
mom, Nivea devotee and Chelsea Hotel resident for more than 20 years-under the
microscope and found out how she survived the last two decades, and Read More
One of my Christmas prezzies was the immensely enjoyable
video of Waiting for Guffman , which
sends up theater as This Is Spinal Tap
satirized rock ‘n’ roll. Christopher Guest (of Spinal Tap ) plays a campy choreographer, Corky St. Clair, who’s
hoping to get back to New York and into the big time of Read More
