How do you tell the story of a movement without simply chronicling the lives of a few supposed leaders of that movement? Sarah Schulman tackles this question head-on in Let […]
Books & Poetry
BOOK REVIEW
Looking Back With Empathy
A gay man connects with his late dad as a soldier
Much has been made of the Greatest Generation and World War II, mostly by Baby Boomers, looking back on the sacrifices of their parents. In the 1960s and ’70s, during […]
BOOK REVIEW
Alison Bechdel Finds Enlightenment in Exercise
The author of Fun Home gets beyond transcendence
One of the pleasures of reading a memoir is witnessing a character make the same mistakes over and over again. Novels rarely leave room for this. By the last page, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Marga Vicedo Dismantles the Myth of the ‘Refrigerator Mother’
Her biography of Clara Park is also a history of autism
Teaching English to G.I.s returning to peacetime America after World War II, Clara Park wrote her mother of her frustration with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Her students, she noted, “had […]
WRITERS
The Tarnished Legacy of the Sacklers
Patrick Radden Keefe takes on a dynastic family
“I like a well-turned story,” says Patrick Radden Keefe. “I try to write stories that are engaging, the kinds of stories that you might not have an interest in at […]
BOOK REVIEW
Understanding The Man Who Ate Too Much
A biography of James Beard takes on new pandemic meaning
About a month ago, my husband Christopher and I were invited to dinner at my in-laws — our first dinner party since the world fell apart last year. While enjoying […]
COMIC STRIP ART
Karl Stevens Turns His Penny Strip Into a Graphic Memoir
The book’s peerlessly inked pages are on view in Provincetown
Most anyone who spends time with a cat will ask what goes on behind the impenetrable stare of its almond-shaped eyes. The Boston-based comic artist and painter Karl Stevens posits […]
BOOK REVIEW
Reassuring the First-Time Gardener
Jessica Sowards’s book is the cure for ‘analysis paralysis’
Sometime in the last year, as one does in a pandemic, I began cleaning drawers. Among the items that I found were unopened packets of seeds. Columbines I’d bought when […]
WRITERS
Hanif Abdurraqib Extols Black Performance
He joins a local reading and talk with Patricia Spears Jones
“I owe Provincetown a great creative debt,” says the poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib. He wrote most of his second book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Tranquility in Water, Wood, and Wild Things
Hannah Kirshner combines drawings, recipes, and personal memoir
Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese government made it difficult for outsiders to explore the country. Even with rapid industrialization and modernization, Japan remained a hard place for […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Order in the Chaos of Fractals
Oliver Linton’s book is not for the number-phobic
I don’t know what I was expecting when I requested a reviewer’s copy of Oliver Linton’s Fractals: On the Edge of Chaos. The pocket-sized book, published in February, appeared to […]
AUTHORS
Revealing the Intimacy of Sex With Strangers
Michael Lowenthal explores the nexus of love, loneliness, and desire
“Intimacy is about the experience of saying to another person — not necessarily in words — ‘This is who truly I am and what I want. Who are you? What […]
BOOK REVIEW
Once Behind Bars, Forever Barred Entry
Reuben Jonathan Miller reckons with America’s ‘carceral system’
Michelle Alexander changed conversations about race-based discrimination in 2010 when she published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander explained that four in five Black […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Talented but Deplorable Patricia Highsmith
A new biography depicts a deeply flawed human being
In most biographies, the subject begins as a larger-than-life figure. Then, after we learn about imperfect relationships and personal quirks, he or she becomes more human. That’s not the case […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Colonial America, Thomas Morton Took the Pure out of Puritan
A new book examines a rebel antihero among the religious exiles
In the book of Joshua, the ancient Israelites settle upon the land that God had promised them, a land called Canaan, and they do so without slaughtering any of the […]
