Category: people

Garrison Keillor Is Not The Man You Know From His Radio Show

“Performers often cultivate alternate personas, but with Mr. Keillor the difference is startling. … ‘Garrison in person is quite different,’ said his longtime friend, the writer Mark Singer. ‘Garrison does not express emotion in interpersonal conversations the way the rest of us do.'” (And if you think of him as kindly, remember what he wrote about Bernard-Henri Lévy: “a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore.”)

Herman Melville Was In Love With Nathaniel Hawthorne – Five Pieces Of Evidence

“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale. Moby-Dick has never before been considered a work of romantic longing, but here are five reasons to believe that Melville’s masterpiece is a profound statement of love denied.”

Gregory Rabassa, 94, Giant Of Literary Translation

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Rabassa, whose work brought (among others) Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado, and Clarice Lispector to the English-speaking world, came from Gabriel García Márquez, who called Rabassa “the best Latin American writer in the English language” and said that his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was a better book than the original.

Creator Of ‘The Big Gay Musical,’ 41, Commits Suicide, Leaves Note On Facebook

“[Fred] Caruso, who was openly gay, wrote or produced – and often directed — several LGBT-themed films, including Go Go Crazy and A Four Letter Word, and he produced the off-Broadway news spoof hit Newsical. But [he] was best known for The Big Gay Musical, a film which follows two gay actors starring in a (fictional) off-Broadway musical titled Adam and Steve Just the Way God Made ‘Em.”

Secrets And Lies: Reporter Tracks Down Mysterious Owner Of ‘Jesus’s Wife’ Papyrus Fragment – Which May Be A Forgery After All

Lab tests did show that the papyrus fiber is ancient, and that the ink could be as well. But journalist Ariel Sabar wanted to investigate the fragment’s chain of ownership – and he “uncovered more than I’d ever expected – a warren of secrets and lies that spanned from the industrial districts of Berlin to the swingers scene of southwest Florida, and from the halls of Harvard and the Vatican to the headquarters of the East German Stasi.”

The Liverpool Shipyard Worker Who Became A Great Wagner Tenor: Alberto Remedios Dead At 81

“He made his name in Reginald Goodall’s highly acclaimed Ring Cycle with English National Opera in the late 1960s and went on to work with many of the leading singers of the day, including Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé. It was a remarkable journey, comparable in many ways with Jon Vickers’s transformation from Canadian lumberjack to acclaimed Heldentenor.”