By Nina Burleigh 9/13/12 4:45pm

opinion

bombshell_2

Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf? Why Female Critics Are Piling On

Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.

It can’t be easy to be a man these days, what with the gender’s looming end, but thinking about Naomi Wolf’s new and much-ridiculed biography of the vagina has reminded me once again of the main reason why I would not want to be a man, or, make that a heterosexual man. Having sex with a woman is a complicated challenge. It exhausts me to think of it.

Read More

By Em Whitney 3/06/09 6:29pm

A Family Romance

The Believers
By Zoe Heller
Harper, 335 pages, $25.99

A distracted, maybe downtrodden personality—part economic casualty, part Barnes & Noble shopper—could at first glance absolutely misconstrue Zoe Heller’s The Believers as an uplifting and/or self-help–related book. This is not the case. Though it has tiny stenciled religious and philosophical iconography bubbled onto its jacket (that Read More

By Lizzy Ratner 8/21/06 12:00am

Long Live Mary of Tribeca

Back before Tribeca became the sun-dappled playground of New York’s Hollywood-on-the-Hudson set, Mary Parvin was running things down there. And when news of her death from cancer early Sunday morning at the Beth Israel Medical Center at age 58 spread through downtown’s literary and artistic community, the grief sounded a particularly deep note, as if Read More