Luis Rodríguez Noa, a young Cuban painter and graphic artist, won first prize in his country’s National Contest of Posters in 2005 for a witty entry commemorating the 400th anniversary […]
PROVINCETOWN BOOK FESTIVAL
Bending Gender, Genre, and Reality’s Fabric
In Isle McElroy’s fiction, identity is volatile, permeable, and relational
In a country of unpredictable roving “man hordes” reported to have “mowed twenty-six lawns in Drain, Illinois” and “kicked a German shepherd to death in Plano, Texas,” a canceled feminist […]
BOOKS
Escaping Virginia: The Education of Drew Gilpin Faust
Harvard’s first woman president talks about her about-to-be-published memoir
“Dear Mr. Eisenhower, I am nine years old and I am white.” These were the opening words of a letter protesting racism in American public education that Catharine Drew Gilpin […]
FICTION
From Pakistan and Mexico to the Outer Cape
Novelist Marina Budhos brings asylum seekers from the global south to Wellfleet
You don’t expect a book about a teenage Pakistani asylum seeker, separated from her mother by the capriciousness of U. S. immigration authorities, and an unaccompanied refugee from gang violence […]
OP-ODE
Provincetown and the Grecian Urn Dilemma
To a troubled American, the town offers a spiritual gift
Late in Covid’s first October, my wife and I stuffed three days of provisions into a picnic cooler, downloaded two long audio books, and drove from Austin, Texas to the […]
BOOKS
Our ‘Yacking’ Democratic Genius
In a new memoir, Robert Pinsky explains what made him a poet — and what makes America poetic
“One way or another, people have more poetry in them than you might think,” insists Robert Pinsky. In 2000, this conviction prompted Pinsky, then the United States Poet Laureate, to […]
BOOKS
Samuel Adams, Fake News, and the Founding of America
In a new biography, Stacy Schiff recovers the ‘Machiavelli of chaos’ who made the revolution
In their affectionate geriatric correspondence, old political rivals Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed that it was “difficult to say at what moment the revolution began.” Was it in 1765, […]
PROVINCETOWN BOOK FESTIVAL
A Tale of Two Queer Artistic Partnerships
New biographies of two towering literary figures: Willa Cather and F.O. Matthiessen
What is the relationship between artistic vocation and sexual identity? Between creative and romantic partnerships? And how should we assess forms of same-sex union and choices about queer self-representation from […]
POLITICAL TALK
How the Republican Party Went Crazy
David Corn of Mother Jones magazine previews his diagnosis of an ‘American psychosis’
The award-winning journalist, author, and MSNBC contributor David Corn pulls no punches. In a recent column, the Mother Jones Washington bureau chief writes that we are living “in a world […]
BOOK REVIEW
American Racism’s Musical Score
Emily Bingham dismantles her Old Kentucky Home
Federal Hill, a restored antebellum plantation house in Bardstown, Ky. better known as the Old Kentucky Home, opened its doors to statewide fanfare and a throng of visitors on July […]
