Articles

“London Calling”: review of London in Verse, Bookforum, Oct 4 2012

A new anthology reflects six-hundred years of the rich and heady language that London poets have chosen to describe their city: its rhythm, its pace, its stench; its people, their stench.

“The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nieztsche, and Barthes at the Piano,” Bookforum, March 20 2012

Engaging with the piano allowed these philosophers to re-think how they experienced and understood the world.

“Believing is Seeing,” Bookforum, Oct 19 2011

A photograph alone does not tell us the whole story of its truth.

“The Noel Coward Reader,” Bookforum, Oct 22 2010

Coward “was a great writer—except when he was trying to be a great writer.”

“Proust’s Overcoat” Bookforum, August 6 2010

Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship to his personal possessions.

“Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, by Graham Robb” Bookforum, April 27 2010

In his new work, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, Graham Robb depicts a Paris that is similarly “a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies,” where “even the quietest street is crowded with adventures.”

“Chorus Girls,” Bookforum, Dec 30 2009

From the cabaret to the nightclub, from the theater to the ballet, women who perform in public have attracted writers and artists for as long as women have performed in public.

“Paris Mismatch,” review of Gilded Youth, by Kate Cambor. Bookforum, Fall 2009

This portrait of a prewar Lost Generation takes an against-the-grain look at a volatile moment in French history, when these famous “children of” stood poised on the edge of greatness but never made it past the threshold: Léon Daudet, son of the beloved French writer Alphonse; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the groundbreaking neurologist Jean-Martin; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor.

The Tragedy of Freud’s Sister, Jan 11 2013

Little known fact: four of Sigmund Freud’s five younger sisters died in the Nazi gas chambers, and he could have saved them. But he didn’t.

Objectively Speaking, Dec 13 2012

“I was always strange,” begins Stephanie LaCava’s memoir An Extraordinary Theory of Objects. It is clear from this that LaCava has always been an object of interest to herself, as well as to others. This was exacerbated when, at age 12, her father’s job caused her family to move to the posh western suburbs of Paris. In France, this outside interest wasn’t always kindly: the locals viewed her with disdain; the kindlier ones didn’t know what to make of her: “It doesn’t make sense: American girl, French accent.”

NW, Sept 2 2012

Where in her earlier novels Smith forced coincidences and symmetries in a frantic braggadocio that James Wood called “hysterical realism,” NW shows a calmer author at work, one who pays more thoughtful attention to the intersection of place and character.

Paris I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, July 14 2012

Rosecrans Baldwin has an unabashed, lifelong fascination with France that it’s not generally considered “cool” to admit to.

Dreaming in French: the Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, April 6 2012

On the surface, Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis would seem to have very little in common, apart from fame and notoriety. But as Alice Kaplan shows in her new book Dreaming in French, they shared one thing which would determine the paths of each of their lives: they each studied in Paris at a formative moment in their youth.

“A Muse to End All Muses”: review of The Last Nude, by Ellis Avery, January 23 2012

The Last Nude operates at the juncture of two genres of fiction that are extremely popular just now: the Time Travel narrative, which like Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife brings the reader back to a legendary time and place or like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris actually transports its characters back in time; and the Behind Every Great Man narrative, which, also like The Paris Wife, or Loving Frank, or any number of books by Tracy Chevalier or Susan Vreeland, tells the love story behind a well-known work of art.

“A ‘Potent Capacity’”: review of Alice James biography, December 30 2011

The contrast between Alice James’s potential for genius and the limitations placed on it is the central theme of Jean Strouse’s biography, originally published in 1980 and reissued recently by NYRB Classics.

An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement, Jan 17 2013

An excerpt from The End of Oulipo? An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement (Zer0 Books)

“They Were Like Us & We Were Like Them,” July 20 2012

Emmanuel Carrère’s work is driven by an ethics of connection: the writer has an obligation to use the story to transcend the gap between one person and another, allowing the reader to perceive the links, not always readily apparent, between his life and the lives of others.

“Beyond the Tower: A Redemptive History of East London,” June 16 2012

If Marriott’s study suggests anything about the ethos of East Londoners over the centuries it is captured here: Finders keepers and we all look after each other.