January stretches out before us like a desolate wilderness raging with inclement weather. What better way to fill the hours than filming your own adaptation of Ulysses and uploading it to the Internet? Other writers who died 70 years ago with works now in the public domain include Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson. Read More
You’re a smart Jew. You go to a prestige college and hang out with a bunch of cool gentile guys. One of them has a fancy sister. You marry her because you want to be in the cool gang. She turns out to be a vicious anti-Semite, but you can’t face it. Your life is Read More
There’s an avid, glittery quality to Nicole Kidman’s eyes. Kubrick understood that she’s particularly suited to suggesting lewdness—“Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing”—but she’s also obviously intelligent, and when she dulls over those startling eyes, she can even indicate existential pain. It’s a toss-up as to which resonates most strongly with David Thomson.
“I don’t Read More
Many years ago, in the course of an otherwise high-minded conversation, a very wise, very distinguished publisher imparted what she billed as an unassailable truth: “Marriages,” she announced, “are made and kept in bed.” To which I would add an equally crucial corollary: Never underestimate the allure of an empty dishwasher. That turns out to Read More
Many years ago, in the course of an otherwise high-minded conversation, a very wise, very distinguished publisher imparted what she billed as an unassailable truth: “Marriages,” she announced, “are made and kept in bed.” To which I would add an equally crucial corollary: Never underestimate the allure of an empty dishwasher. That turns out Read More
Last month, the editors of The New York Times Magazine proclaimed their contributing writer Daphne Merkin “one of the most daring and ruminative writers of our time” on the table-of-contents page. Ms. Merkin’s brief essay in that week’s issue plunged into a new and scary kind of cosmetic surgery for women: “These are cruel times Read More
According to Hermione Lee, author of a “definitive” biography published nearly a decade ago, “Virginia Woolf’s story is reformulated by each generation. She takes on the shape of difficult modernist … or comedian of manners, or neurotic highbrow aesthete, or inventive fantasist, or pernicious snob, or Marxist feminist, or historian of women’s lives, or Read More
According to Hermione Lee, author of a “definitive” biography published nearly a decade ago, “Virginia Woolf’s story is reformulated by each generation. She takes on the shape of difficult modernist … or comedian of manners, or neurotic highbrow aesthete, or inventive fantasist, or pernicious snob, or Marxist feminist, or historian of women’s lives, or victim Read More
Heir to the Glimmering World , by Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin, 310 pages, $24.
Confession: It’s not Virginia Woolf I’m afraid of-it’s Cynthia Ozick. Even though she blurbed my last book (disclosure, disclosure) and once recommended me for a fellowship I didn’t get (thanks for the memories, Mr. Guggenheim), still I’m afraid of her. Read More
Regarding the Pain of Others , by Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 131 pages, $20.
In The Reprieve , the second novel of his “Roads to Freedom” trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre captured the dismal atmosphere of France on the eve of war with Hitler, when defeatism often wore the badge of pacifism. His character Read More
