Category: people

In a War Paint backstage interview in which she talks about plenty else as well, the Broadway diva tells Jackson McHenry, “I don’t know how long my voice will last. By the time another one comes along I may not have a voice. I don’t want to have be character woman and be put in a box [on the side of a poster]. I can’t be a leading lady forever, so why not go out in a blaze of glory as Helena Rubinstein?”

“Samantha Geimer was 13 years old when Polanski assaulted her in Los Angeles in 1977. In recent years, she has said repeatedly that she has forgiven Polanski, now 83, but Friday’s appearance would make the first time Geimer has appeared publicly at a court hearing in the case.”

“Dylan submitted his lecture, four thousand and eight words long, to the Swedes on June 5th. You can read it here, and listen, too; Dylan made a recording of his text, speaking for twenty-seven minutes over a smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement. Not for him, the sombre pomp of the podium. He sounds like a lounge singer lost in contemplative patter, just letting the thoughts flow. Pour yourself a whiskey, honey, pull up a chair, and stay awhile.”

Amelia Gray: “Isadora spent her whole life straddling the gap between public perception and private reality. In writing Isadora, a novel set during a particularly dark year and a half of her life, I found myself having to pick through that reality, reality as Isadora wished to create it, and a third, emotional reality, which aspired to contain recognizable truths.”

“[His] five critically acclaimed novels included a savage sendup of The New York Times Book Review, where he had worked as an editor for three decades.”

Ismene Brown: “Sergei Vikharev was the passionate pioneer of a brave new movement to install period sensibilities in an art form that had long become the plaything of its performers and coaches rather than its creators.”

“[His] cerebral novels about radical politics, most famously The Company You Keep, challenged readers with biblical parables and ethical dilemmas.”

Jose María de Eça de Quierós “established his reputation with his tense and claustrophobic first novel, The Crime of Father Amaro. It is a debut that’s also not one: it was twice seriously revised after publication. (Among other changes, the third edition is almost five times as long as the first.)”

Goytisolo won Spain’s Cervantes Prize in 2014 and, despite leaving Spain in 1956, was still quite immersed in Spanish literary life. Although he wanted “to leave behind the traditional forms of the Spanish literary culture, Cervantes was his guide, as were the classic nonconformists who broke the language and the conventions of the novel, poetry or theater.”

He produced plays on Broadway, off-Broadway and farther afield, and he was the first director of Los Angeles’ Center Theater Group. “He often said, though, that the pinnacle of his career was being the production stage manager in 1956 of the original Broadway production of O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ one of a dozen Broadway shows he stage-managed after abandoning a brief acting and singing stint in his 20s.”