Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann. I [...]
Category Archives: Nonfiction
John D’agata, About a Mountain
May 21, 2010 – 5:43 am
Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press Photograph by Skye Parrott
Sexually I’m More of a Switzerland, edited by David Rose
March 26, 2010 – 12:57 pm
We are all in the gutter, and most of us have our minds firmly entrenched there. Certainly that’s the case with the lovelorn desperadoes who populate the personal ads of The London Review of Books. Like most of us, they’re looking for love but willing to settle for a little dirty action…yet what separates these [...]
Fire At the End of the Rainbow
March 23, 2010 – 4:49 pm
Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily [...]
Letters to Jackie Kennedy
March 9, 2010 – 5:52 am
More than a million people wrote letters to Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination. Some were famous, like Langston Hughes, but most were just normal people, sending their condolences and expressing their sadness and bewilderment. In her new book, “Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation,” released by HarperCollins, Ellen Fitzpatrick went through these [...]
Review: Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman
January 19, 2010 – 9:03 am
One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned [...]
Fear of Music: Is Experimental Music an Institution, or Institutionalizable?
September 2, 2009 – 2:31 pm
Although it never quite fully answers its foundational question, Fear of Music does provide the necessary background for interested readers to formulate their own answers while at the same time raising interesting questions about the relationship of the arts across disciplines.
