-
Reading Amanda Knox
Rebecca Mead on the “dispiriting account” of prevailing sexual mores in Amanda Knox’s memoir: “…if empowerment, that much abused and much diminished term, means anything it means being able to say no as well as yes, without censure or shame.” http://nyr.kr/11qLIY3
Illustration by Tom Bachtell
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
Why I Am a Thief
Editors’ note: In 1902, Mary MacLane, a nineteen-year-old-girl from Butte, Montana, published a book detailing her fantasies, her outrageous philosophical ideas, and intimations of her own genius. The book was a sensation, selling a hundred thousand copies in its first month, and launching her into a short but fiery life of writing and misadventure. A template for the confessional memoirs that have become ubiquitous, “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” is being published in a new edition by Melville House this week.
Here’s an excerpt: http://nyr.kr/Ykht64
Photograph: Library of Congress.
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
Keith Waldrop’s Haunted Realism
I don’t think I’ve ever read a less judgmental book, let alone a less judgmental family history. Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend. Someone looking for a conventional novel or memoir might experience this as a kind of imaginative poverty, but it’s his restraint that allows Waldrop to depict so powerfully the world “as it was and as it is.”
His supposedly poor imagination—his power of attunement to the world—allows Waldrop to present scenes of quiet power most authors would overwrite or ignore…
Ben Lerner on Keith Waldrop’s memoir, “Light While There Is Light”: http://nyr.kr/128rcAD
Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
The Vexing Simplicity of Neil Young
I was a little surprised when Neil Young published his memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace,” because he is the only artists I have ever encountered who is proud of not reading. Reading would distract him from writing songs, he once told me, meaning interfere with whatever mechanism supplied him with his melodies and lyrics. I am not suggesting that I know better than he does what methods are appropriate for him, but I wonder what else he might have written if he had sought the company of writers such as Tolstoy or Dickens or Chekhov or Kierkeaard…
Continue reading Alec Wilkinson on Neil Young.
Photograph by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns.
-
In Tad Friend’s Talk of the Town piece on Penny Marshall in this week’s issue of the magazine, Friend visits the Upper West Side apartment of the “Laverne & Shirley” star and show-biz veteran to discuss her new memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts.”
Watch the book trailer for the memoir, starring Fred Armisen as Marshall, and click-through for more from Rachel Arons on Marshall: http://nyr.kr/QeEVhl
-
…he also knew that his old self’s habits were of no use anymore. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of “Satanic Verses,” a title that had been subtly distorted by the omission of the initial “The.” “The Satanic Verses” was a novel. “Satanic Verses” were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight…
In this exclusive excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir, “Joseph Anton” (about his life in seclusion after the Iranian head of state, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his murder), Rushdie writes about the inspiration for “The Satanic Verses,” his thinking when working on the book, and his reaction to the anger among Muslims after its publication. Click-through to read the excerpt: http://nyr.kr/NZYSnz
(PHOTOGRAPH: “Salman Rushdie, London, England, September 26, 1994”/© 1994 The Richard Avedon Foundation)
-
A Sunday morning cartoon by Roz Chast: http://nyr.kr/MoBMGq
-
R. Kelly’s Single Entendre
In his twenty-year exploration of the limits of the R. & B. sex ballad, R. Kelly has often toed the line between satiric and satyric. In his song “Sex Planet,” he made the obvious joke about Uranus; in his song “Sex In the Kitchen,” he made the obvious joke about salad-tossing; in his song “Pregnant,” male backup singers (ominously? chivalrously?) offered to “knock you up.” He has referred to himself as a “sexosaurus” and a “lesbian R. & B. thug.” He has attempted onomatopoetic renderings of cunnilingus and of flesh skidding down a stripper pole. He has yodeled, twice, in the songs “Echo” and “Feelin’ on Yo Booty.” (To perform the latter song in concert, he donned a top hat and cape for an extended operatic remix.) And then there is his unfinished magnum opus “Trapped in the Closet,” a series of twenty-two songs (and counting) featuring a gay pastor, a stuttering pimp, and a woman named Bridget whose husband is a midget.
All of which inspires the inevitable question: he’s kidding, right?
Andrew Marantz looks at R. Kelly’s new ghostwritten memoir, “Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me,” as it illuminates his twenty-year career in music: http://nyr.kr/Nb9L5G
-
"How I Survived The Fifties"→
Excerpts from the memoir that Gore Vidal said he wouldn’t write: http://bit.ly/OBn7tu
-
“Always Returning,” an essay by Teju Cole on W.G. Sebald, Thomas Browne, WWII airfields, and coincidence: http://nyr.kr/Q6ylcn
(Photograph by Teju Cole.)
