Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen: at The Paris Review Daily I wrote about Brookner’s strange, subversive, and underrated talent.
The Vanishing Pugilist and the Poet: my Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable piece about poet, artist, and bohemian adventurer Mina Loy (centre, in Paris in the 1920s with Jane Heap and Ezra Pound), and how her husband of nine months, boxer and literary provocateur Arthur Cravan, might have faked his own death in Mexico.
At Paris Review Daily, I wrote about Rosamond Lehmann’s singular debut novel, a major succès de scandale when it was published and, on its 90th anniversary, as entrancing as ever.
Genius, Interrupted: my Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable longread on French sculptor Camille Claudel, who spent the last thirty years of her life in an insane asylum and is now one of the most expensive women artists in the world.
At Longreads, I wrote about a novel that made several weirdly enduring contributions to our lexicon (and inspired many plays and films, such as 1931′s Svengali with John Barrymore -- above right -- in the eponymous role), but is seldom read anymore.
At the end of summer, 1887 -- Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year -- Henry James, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, and one of England’s most well-connected families converged upon the same country house party. As I explore at Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, events that weekend would reverberate throughout life and literature.
The Sad, Short, Brilliant Life of Amy Levy -- my essay at Tablet Magazine about the novelist, poet, and journalist who, 127 years ago, committed suicide in London at age 27.
At Paris Review Daily, I consider the life and afterlife of Jane Morris: 19th century supermodel, wife of trailblazing designer William Morris, and lover-muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
At Longreads, I wrote about Margaret King -- aka Lady Mount Cashell, aka Mrs Mason -- a late 18th century-born Irish aristocrat who, after being tutored as a teenager by Mary Wollstonecraft, led a life of admirable rebellion.
For Words Without Borders’ May issue, I reviewed The Attempt, a new novel by Czech author Magdaléna Platzová, translated by Alex Zucker:
A reimagining of the events and people surrounding the assassination attempt, in 1892, of American art-collecting plutocrat Henry Clay Frick by Lithuanian Jewish anarchist Alexander Berkman, the story is narrated by a Czech historian transplanted to contemporary Manhattan, and thematically framed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. You might expect, therefore, to wade through a glut of historical contextualizing, as well as to be hammered over the head by weighty political concepts and resonances. Instead, Platzová’s ultra-restrained curation of her material, translated with equal restraint and discrimination by Alex Zucker, has excluded every superfluous detail, every hint of preachiness or sentimentality or pat morality. The result is a powerfully distilled meditation on the meaning of freedom, a ferocious complexity lurking beneath its smooth and hypnotically readable surface.
At The Awl, I wrote about the British tradition of celebrity press injunctions, and how the internet may be consigning them to history.
Five years ago, when the novel was first published in Italy, this portrayal of mass media’s clout utterly dwarfing that of a flawed and anachronous legal system may have seemed lightly satirical, a minor exaggeration for comic effect. But in light of the huge international public response to NPR’s Serial podcast, and with the prospect of Adnan Syed winning his freedom thanks to, essentially, the court of public opinion, such a take on the power of the audience—and the blurring of the line between factual reporting and entertainment—conspicuously mirrors current reality
Without resorting to black-and-white moralizing—even the Master, it seems, is warped by his assigned role in a murky and coercive Realpolitik—Preussler spins a hypnotic tale that operates on two levels: as an entertaining take on the ever-appealing trope of a magical secret society, and as a nuanced commentary on our capacity to submit to, and resist, corruption.
From my Words Without Borders review of the late Otfried Preussler's Krabat and the Sorcerer's Mill, first published in 1972 and now reissued by The New York Review Children's Collection.
My essay about MI5's WWII spy-astrologer--commissioned by the brilliant Carrie Frye for The Awl--has been translated into French by Jules Michel-Rodrigues and appears at Ulyces, a new digital publisher dedicated to narrative journalism by writers from France and around the world.
At Kenyon Review Online, I wrote about Savage Coast -- poet, journalist, and political activist Muriel Rukeyser's Spanish Civil War novel, rejected in 1937 and published recently for the first time.
Source: thedailybeast.com
Scott-Clark and Levy’s retelling of the disaster from the vantage points of trapped and imperiled guests and staff, as well as from the perspective of the terrorists themselves, reads like an expertly-constructed thriller that’s all the more heart-stopping because it actually happened. Hiding out in various parts of the hotel, hearing the staccato of gunshots overhead and underfoot as gunmen roamed the building, hundreds of people faced a terrible choice: if you barricaded yourself in a room, you might avoid getting shot, but you might end up burnt or asphyxiated as the gunmen started fires and caused explosions. Will Pike, a 28-year-old Londoner, decided that the only way out of his room, 60 feet above ground, was through the window, whose double-glazed panes he smashed with a marble coffee table. Sabina Sehgal Saikia, a prominent restaurant critic and mother of two, stayed huddled in her magnificent suite. Only one of them survived.
From my review of The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy's fantastically well-researched account of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Source: thedailybeast.com