- Caleb Crain: What the Great Depression did to culture.
8220;I want to find out why I’m working,” Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday.” Grant’s character, a grocer’s son who put himself through Harvard, wants to take time off from a promising business career, and Grant makes the proposal . . ....
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
THE THEATRE
OLD FRIENDS
Feb. 8-19
City Center’s “Encores!” series presents lively concert versions of oft-forgotten and cult-favorite musicals. The season begins with Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” from 1981, starring Colin Donnell, Lin-Manuel Miranda . . ....
- Books: “Family Britain, 1951-1957.”
The second volume of Kynaston’s epic social history of postwar Britain covers a period of stabilization: jobs abounded; food rationing ended; and though the Conservatives’ victory in 1951 was fuelled partly by Churchill’s derision of the “Queuetopia” created by Labour, his party did . . ....
- Books: “The Good Muslim.”
In this portrait of postwar Bangladesh, a brother-sister duo symbolize, almost too neatly, the clash between secularism and fundamentalism. Maya, a doctor and rebel, is outraged by Sohail’s transformation into a holy man with a following. Peripheral characters seem far more complex, from Maya’s irreverent . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Lana Del Rey’s image on “Born to Die.”
In 2008, Elizabeth Grant, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Lake Placid, recorded an album in Manhattan with the well-known producer David Kahne. It was released digitally in early 2010 as “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant,” but was pulled offline two months later. This week . . ....
- Books: “Point Omega.”
This thin novel begins and ends with a brilliant analysis of an art installation consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” slowed down so that it lasts twenty-four hours. DeLillo seems to be instructing the reader: “The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also . . ....
- Night Life: Spring Preview
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In 1988, the actor Paul Newman, taking inspiration from his role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” started the Hole in the Wall Camps, where children with serious medical conditions could swim, fish, have fun, and forget about their illnesses for . . ....
- Books: “The News Where You Are.”
O’Flynn’s plots unspool in the postwar English landscapes you never see on Masterpiece Theatre. Frank Allcroft is a television anchor on a Birmingham news show specializing in human-interest stories: local murders, savory-pie competitions, unexpected holes opening up in pensioners’ back gardens. But off . . ....
- Books: “Townie.”
This charged memoir by the author of “House of Sand and Fog” begins as his parents’ marriage unravels, and his father, an acclaimed writer, leaves his mother struggling to support four kids. Living in poor towns in northern Massachusetts, Dubus and his siblings “roamed the neighborhoods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.”
The author’s transformation from Southern California jock into “sexually neutered androgyne” began the summer after tenth grade, when he abruptly quit playing soccer, pierced his ears, and discovered lip gloss. Goulian’s choices have cost him professionally (he abandoned a law career, in part because . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “Sons of the Prophet” and “Relatively Speaking” reviews.
8220;Ravishing” is the best word for Stephen Karam’s new comedy “Sons of the Prophet” (elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels). At once deep, deft, and beautifully made, “Sons of the Prophet” stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Lake.”
The narrator of Yoshimoto’s ruminative novel has abandoned her provincial home town, where she was shunned as the illegitimate child of a businessman, and moved to Tokyo, where she can be “just like everyone else.” After her mother dies, she falls into a weightless relationship (“ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Wooden Hat”
In this understated novel, Gardam returns to the successful barrister and judge Sir Edward Feathers, the protagonist of her deliciously acerbic “Old Filth.” The complementary tale, told largely from the point of view of Feathers’s wife, Betty, a fellow-“Raj orphan,” begins as the . . ....
- Theatre: Winter Preview
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The British monologuist Daniel Kitson returns to St. Ann’s Warehouse with “It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later.” (Previews begin Jan. 3.) | MCC revives the musical adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “Carrie,” about a . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
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There’s juggling and then there’s what Michael Moschen does; he’s more of a conceptual artist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and he was David Bowie’s contact-juggling double in “ . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Randy Newman at the Oscars and Town Hall.
Randy Newman makes an appearance almost every winter, not as regularly as Punxsutawney Phil, but close—it’s at the Academy Awards, where he’s been nominated for Best Original Song six times since the turn of the century, including this year, for “We Belong Together . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Galore”
Crummey’s expansive yarn begins mysteriously, when a mute albino is pulled from the belly of a whale, and ends when the albino’s descendant, several generations later, plunges into one. Between lies the folkloric history of Paradise Deep, a Newfoundland fishing community composed of “implacable barrens . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- Books: “Electric Eden.”
This sprawling, mesmerizing exploration of “Britain’s visionary music” examines the idiosyncratic folk-influenced musicians of the late sixties and early seventies. Young begins with Vashti Bunyan, who wrote plaintive songs while travelling across industrial England by horse and cart, and focusses on performers who drew on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Chill”
8220;The chill of suspicion and incomprehension came between me and humankind when I was sixteen,” Bilenchi’s spare, dark bildungsroman begins. Following an unnamed teen-ager’s initiation into adulthood in Tuscany in the Fascist years, it is a series of episodes of alienation, narrated in . . ....
- Books: “Princess Noire.”
8220;Princess Noire” was the original, unused title of Nina Simone’s autobiography, and Cohodas duly appropriates it for her account of the singer’s life and career. Simone, born Eunice Waymon and nurtured as a child prodigy, devoted her early years to classical piano. After a . . ....
- Christie’s @ Christie’s
After its evening sale of Impressionist and modern art (May 4), Christie’s offers yet more pieces from the collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody in its auction of (mostly) works on paper (May 5), including a painted glazed ceramic by Fernand Léger (“Les Oiseaux”). Later in the day, the house will hold its third and final Impressionist sale, led by a Pissarro landscape...
- Books: “Funeral for a Dog.”
In this grave, gentle novel, Daniel Mandelkern, a journalist and former ethnologist, is sent to profile Dirk Svensson, the reclusive, childless author of a best-selling children’s book. He soon realizes that “the research intern did a terrible job”: Svensson does have a child, possibly two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “To Be Sung Underwater.”
Judith Whitman (née Toomey), the heroine of McNeal’s second novel, is a child of divorce, who learned early that “all marriages come with a pinhole leak.” Uneasy in her role as wife and mother, Judith grows nostalgic for the romance of her teen-age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Walks with Men.”
Beattie’s novella is set in the Manhattan of literary aspirants’ dreams: a recent Harvard graduate, Jane, takes up with Neil, a man twenty-three years her senior, who provides an education in food, clothing, and sex. “You’re smart,” he says, “but you . . ....
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
