It didn’t take Barbara Clarke long to decide she wanted to buy the Provincetown Bookshop. The store has been a beloved fixture in the lives of Clarke and her two […]
Books & Poetry
TIME AND THE TOWN
David Dunlap Is Endlessly Building Provincetown
A reissue of his 2015 book highlights a feast of local color
David W. Dunlap’s Building Provincetown is an ongoing project with a worthy aim: to create a comprehensive history of the town — that is, its residents, year-round and part-time, and […]
BOOK REVIEW
Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros Look to the Future
In confronting the climate crisis, they write, ‘all our actions matter’
For nearly an entire week earlier this month, the global climate crisis managed to grab hold of headlines. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had released its […]
BOOK REVIEW
Martha Minow’s Warning on the Future of a Free Press
Digital gerrymandering, she argues, drives the internet newsscape
Forty-five percent of U.S. newsroom jobs evaporated between 2008 and 2017. In 2016, less than a third of people in one survey trusted mass media. The doomsday facts about the […]
BOOK REVIEW
William di Canzio’s Alec Meets E.M. Forster’s Maurice
New novel reimagines a queer classic
The Englishman E.M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels and published five of these between 1905 and 1924. Best known and loved are A Room With a View, Howards End, and […]
COMING UP FOR AIR
Slowly, Outer Cape Libraries Begin to Reopen
The ‘lemonade of Covid’: more remote services and collaboration
The orders from town officials came down suddenly and in quick succession: on March 13, 2020 for Provincetown, on March 14 for Eastham, on March 16 for Wellfleet, and on […]
BOOK REVIEW
Re-evaluating the Guilt of Ethel Rosenberg
Anne Sebba’s biography of an infamous woman
The American press largely supported Judge Irving Kaufman’s decision at the height of the Red Scare to sentence Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death. In March 1951, a jury found […]
BOOK REVIEW
A Romance Set on the Outer Cape
Miranda Cowley Heller’s debut novel
Miranda Cowley Heller’s novel The Paper Palace tells the story of Elle, a woman whose life is both troubled and complicated. She must choose which man to share her life […]
LITERARY LIFE
New Owner Sought for Provincetown Bookshop
The shop was a haunt for a host of famous people during its long tenure
PROVINCETOWN — The well-loved bookstore where Norman Mailer and Robert Motherwell could frequently be found browsing will soon close unless some bibliophile steps forward to carry on the business. The […]
BOOK REVIEW
Opening Up With Anne Peretz
Reimagining family therapy for those most at risk
“I knew I had to write this book because I’m the only one who knows the story from beginning to end,” says Anne Peretz from her Truro home. The book […]
BOOK REVIEW
A Descending Spiral of Violence and Injustice
Marc Bookman writes of the barbarism of the death penalty
It’s uncomfortable to feel entertained at the expense of those sentenced to death. It is less uncomfortable when most of this entertainment is at the expense of police, prosecuting attorneys, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Sarah Schulman’s Mesmerizing, Messy History of ACT UP
How an alphabet soup of affinity groups fought an epidemic
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 […]
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 […]
