“The local prosecutor wrote an urgent letter to its publishers trying to delay its release. Book sellers are taking orders for copies that wait in sealed boxes, ready to be opened on Tuesday. Some people are dreading its revelations about rape in their football-loving college town. Others are glad: Tell the story, they say, the louder the better.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Historian And Author Frederic Morton Dead At 90
“An Austrian-born Holocaust refugee who became a highly regarded chronicler of his abandoned homeland, capturing in works of history and fiction the Viennese society at the fin de siècle and on the eve of two world wars,” Morton was best known for A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889 and Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914, as well as a history of the world’s most famous banking family The Rothschilds.
Gregory Pardlo’s Long Rise To Sudden Fame And The Pulitzer For Poetry
“Mr. Pardlo’s path to poetry was tortuous and unconventional, punctuated by long breaks and odd jobs. He struggled with alcoholism, which runs in his family. ‘My family’s a hot mess,’ he said.”
How Did San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums Lose Their Director After Just Two Years? And What Do They Do Now?
“The departure of Colin Bailey, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco since June 2013, to become director of the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. throws FAMSF back into a quandary, if not a crisis, of leadership. … Most museum directors who change jobs in less than two years’ time leave under a cloud of dissension or discontent, but Bailey told The Chronicle by phone that he had not been looking for a job elsewhere.”
Prada Foundation Opens Contemporary Art Museum in Milan
“For more than 20 years, the Prada Foundation has been staging contemporary art exhibitions in abandoned warehouses and disused churches” in Milan. “Recently, however, the Prada Foundation has set its sights on establishing permanent homes to present exhibitions and to show its vast holdings of art, mostly works from the 1950s to the present.”
A French Philosopher Who Has Happiness (!) Figured Out
Frédéric Lenoir: “It’s difficult to get what you want. Even if we desire something, most of the time we don’t take the right steps to get it – that’s the problem with pleasure. We want to be happy, but we prefer pleasure. But pleasure and happiness are quite different.”
We’ve Got Another Faked-Memoir Scandal To Feast On
“The ‘memoir’ of a British war correspondent who purportedly committed rape, murder and other crimes before dying last year was initially written several years ago as a novel, it has emerged. Author Colin Carroll had described the novel in an interview more than five years ago with a local newspaper in Cork.”
From Augustine To Oprah: Why We Get Confessional In Public (And Why People Listen)
“For while the instinct to confess is not always hard to understand – whether or not the confessor means to justify or condemn himself – the instinct to hear a confession is another thing entirely.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates Unpacks the Way Comics Have Conquered the World
“Seventy-seven years after Superman first leapt into the American imagination, superhero stories have never been more popular (or lucrative). Comics have become a breeding ground for multibillion-dollar movie and TV franchises … But why are superheroes resonating so strongly? And are they worthy of the attention? These questions are important enough to compel Ta-Nehisi Coates to take a timeout from kicking off national conversations about race and politics, don his fanboy cape, and go in search of the answers.”
Surely You Can’t Be Serious: An Oral History Of “Airplane!”
“Yes, we’re serious. And don’t call us Shirley.” The three writer-directors and several cast members give their memories of life on the set.