Author: Matthew Westphal

Priscilla Morgan, One of the 20th Century’s Great Cultural Matchmakers, Dead at 94

“Known for recognizing talent and nurturing it, for making connections among artists – ‘an instinctive, intellectual switchboard,’ [one observer] wrote of her – Ms. Morgan was at various times an agent, an amanuensis, an administrator, a salon-keeper and a behind-the-scenes alchemist who helped forge creative partnerships for decades.”

Critic and Pianist Harris Goldsmith, 77

“Goldsmith, who set aside a pianistic career to write for High Fidelity magazine in the heyday of the classical LP, became a familiar and influential critical voice for music lovers in the ’50s and ’60s, and could be spotted almost any night of the week in the press section of one or another of the New York concert halls, listening intently and then expounding to his colleagues on the music.” (includes audio)

‘A Rich Noticer of Strange Things’ – Colm Tóibín on Lynne Tillman

“Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing. An observation; a dry fact; a memory; something noticed; someone encountered; a joke; something wry; a provocation; something playful.”

Why There Needs To Be a ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations’

Retha Powers, editor of the newly-published first edition, says that people ask her, “Why have this book if we have a President who is black? Is it really necessary for us to do this?” She says that the reason is to add stories to our collective memory: “The lens through which we look at history, when it’s narrow, tells us a very, very narrow story, a narrow impression of what the truth is.”