Category: people

The author “left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. … [I]n November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography.”

“American writer Junot Diaz, who captured a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 2008, has been elected to the Pulitzer board. The novelist, who won for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was informed of his three-year tenure on Thursday night.”

She stars in a movie in which she plays a lesbian. The British Home Office “has denied her asylum and she now faces the prospect of deportation to Iran followed by flogging, execution or both.”

“[He is] seen as a man who once had it all in terms of power and freedom … [Yet] Welles stubbornly insisted on keeping his freedom long after he had to relinquish his power, which makes him a troubled role model at best. Some people who continue to envy the power he once had wind up resenting the freedom he continued to exercise, especially when it became the freedom to hold back his work for one reason or another.”

“Knowing that [his friends would] one day be famous, Ginsberg documented their lives — their travels, late nights and meandering walks. And he did it all with a second-hand Kodak camera, using nothing more than the instructions on the film packets.”

Conceptual artist and designer Arakawa and his wife, Madeline Gins, “explored their philosophy, which they called Reversible Destiny, in poems, books, paintings and, when they found clients, buildings. … All of it was meant, the couple explained, to lead its users into a perpetually ‘tentative’ relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.”

“What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want – not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. … Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?”

A piano prodigy who had mastered all of Beethoven’s sonatas by age 12, she met her composer husband when she took his harmony class at the Paris Conservatoire; he went on to write two great piano cycles and many solo parts in orchestral and chamber works for her. She was also an early specialist in the music of Pierre Boulez.

“Broadway composer Charles Strouse, in Philadelphia yesterday to receive a lifetime-achievement award, fell ill onstage at the Arts Bank performing-arts venue after a musical performance of some of his works.”

The award-winning director (The White Balloon, The Circle), who supported opposition candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi in the disputed 2009 presidential election, was arrested in March and sent to Evin Prison in Tehran; he began his hunger strike on Sunday. His case has drawn much attention at the Cannes Festival, where he would have been on this year’s jury.