“I think I’ve a terrible defect,” said Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, “which is, I don’t have a very full sense of time. I don’t feel an enormous accretion of years or anything like that. I’m very involved in what we’re doing here—as involved as ever—and I don’t think Read More
In the mid-1980′s, someone asked the late Thomas Flanagan if he’d he read Erica Jong’s last novel. “I definitely hope so,” he replied.
He was a man of lightning wit and great learning. His first novel, The Year of the French (1979), won a National Book Critics Circle Award and earned a glowing front-page review Read More
“I can remember going to some very, very high-powered and glamorous parties, with her or because of her, at, say, Roger Straus’,” recalled the writer Stephen Koch, who became friends with Susan Sontag in 1965, when she was in her early 30′s. “And you would walk in, and it was wall-to-wall Nobel Prize winners and Read More
Where is Mary McCarthy now that we need her? Now that we seem to be entering into a moment in culture in which truth and fiction are routinely blurred to the point that an entirely new hybrid genre seems to have been created: one that might be called “triction.” A limbo realm with no fidelity Read More
Imaginary Friends, which is about those two mortal enemies, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, is Nora Ephron’s first play, unfortunately. In the usual way, we would try to be kind about any first-time playwright who fouls up as badly as this. We might say, for instance, “We very much look forward to Ms. Ephron’s second Read More
Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy , by Frances Kiernan. W.W. Norton & Company, 845 pages, $35.
Mary McCarthy was a tactician of scandal; she had a sure sense of just how much would be good for her. She learned this early on. In her freshman English class at Vassar, students’ papers were Read More
Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals , by David Laskin. Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $26.
Even a quick study of the cerebral crew known as the New York intellectuals reveals that the female of the species never received the attention she deserves. For the most part, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Read More
The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury , by Mary F. Corey. Harvard University Press, 251 pages, $25.95.
Anyone involved in creating or canonizing The New Yorker of the 40′s and 50′s will hate Mary Corey’s The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury . That’s my guess. But I Read More
