A well-researched, sensitive literary biography.
The triumphs and tragedies of an American writer.
Drawing on abundant archival material, much not available to earlier biographers, Dearborn offers a thorough, passionate recounting of the life of Carson McCullers (1917-1967), a writer with an “unerring instinct for the outsider’s life.” As a young child, Carson (born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia) “was marked out as special.” Her parents decided she would become a concert pianist, a goal Carson energetically pursued, though she expressed interest in being a composer or writer. In 1934, she went to New York, apparently intending to enroll at Juilliard, but she wound up taking writing classes at Columbia instead. Soon after, on a visit home, she met the handsome James Reeves McCullers, also an aspiring writer, and, like Carson, a heavy drinker. They clicked immediately, although, Dearborn notes, “in their relationship, she was emphatically the beloved.” Carson, tall and gangly, preferred to dress in men’s clothes, which she said she found more comfortable. She and Reeves married in 1937, but Carson’s most passionate attractions were to women. Her first awakening to love was for her piano teacher; she later became obsessed with the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, harbored “erotic feelings” for producer Cheryl Crawford, and fell in love with her therapist, a married woman. Bisexual and androgynous, Carson made gender fluidity “a thread through her major works.” Dearborn chronicles Carson’s rise to fame, including the 1940 publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her friendships with the likes of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, and the severe health issues and alcoholism that undermined her. Strep throat in childhood led to rheumatic fever and, by the time she was 30, two major, disabling strokes. Alive to “the dangers and ecstasies of otherness,” Carson, Dearborn writes, was defined by queerness, as an artist and a woman.
A well-researched, sensitive literary biography.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780525521013
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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