Category: literary life

Maud links to a funny proposal to ban gay literature, which came in response to reports that Lynne Cheney’s forgotten lesbian novel was being feted again.

i don’t know about you, but i think if the cheneys are serious about stopping the spread of homosexuality, they should propose a constitutional amendment against gay literature. and definitely any gay literature set in wyoming. because if you think about it, there was no gay marriage when mary [the Cheneys’ gay daughter] was a child. and yet somehow — mysteriously — she grew up to like bearded clams. isn’t the solution simple? ban gay literature and then your kids won’t find creative uses for flashlights under the covers in their bedrooms while READING THEIR MOM’S PORNOGRAPHIC LESBOSLUT NOVELS.

It seems everyone is talking about Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment at the NYBTR, so if you’re coming here for my two cents, here they are: I’m glad a decision’s been made, I’m (cautiously) glad it’s Sam Tanenhaus, but, really, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. So, we shall see how things turn out come April.

Oh, poor Martin Amis. He doesn’t have a book deal in the U.S. The New York Times is doing what it can to help him out.

The Escapist, the comic book based on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel, has just been published.

Chabon’s “The Passing of the Key” is, not surprisingly, the strongest story in the collection. The story is taken at times verbatim from the pages of the novel. Comparing Chabon’s two takes on the one tale is instructive: the comic misses some of the novel’s virtuoso lyricism, but the novel misses the comic’s ability to provide motion to even the most static passage of exposition through illustration, and the sheer immediacy of the storytelling.

Read the review here.

Two puny words bedevil playwright Tony Kushner. One is “the.” The other is “end.” Separately, they pose no hint of a threat. But together, they conjure the ever-elusive horizon in Kushner’s working life, a professional goal line he rarely allows himself to reach.

Peter Marks reviews a new staging of Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul.

Ted Widmer reviews Mark Kurlansky’s new book, 1968, an overview of the year in politics, and an argument for why that specific year was so important.

If memory is closely related to self-definition, then it’s easy to understand why the year 1968 is still with us. Certain years stand out for world-shaping events (2001; 1963), and others, more rare, for a feeling that our DNA itself is changing, and an alternative universe of human possibility is coming into view, if only for a brief, tantalizing moment. 1848 was such a year, and 1968 had the same electric quality. “Be realistic; demand the impossible,” read a poster in Paris. In countries that barely had official relations