Greenidge based her book partly on Susan Smith McKinney Steward, who in the 1870s was the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York State. As she researched the family, she found herself drawn to the doctor’s wayward daughter, Anna. She became the model for Libertie, the kind of historical figure who is rarely celebrated: someone who simply wants to survive and thrive, not to be the first or the only one of anything.
“So much of Black history is focused on exceptional people,” Greenidge said in a video interview earlier this month. “Part of what I wanted to explore is, what’s the emotional and psychological toll of being an exception, of being exceptional, and also, what about the people who just want to have a regular life and find freedom and achievement in being able to live in peace with their family — which is what Libertie wants?”
In Williamsburg, on a seven-acre park by the East River, spring will soon unfurl in blue blossoms. Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.
On Monday, the meadow got its annual mow-down, its grasses trimmed to six inches to make way for springtime blooms. “The mow-down encourages this rebirth and regrowth,” said Leslie Wright, the city’s regional director of the state park system. If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.
Midway through Julia Claiborne Johnson's second novel, "Better Luck Next Time," two women show up at a masquerade dance wearing costumes they have stolen from a local college production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." One is dressed as a fairy, "a gossamer costume" with "glittery wings"; the other wears Bottom's papier-mâché donkey's head, "a string of pearls, and nothing else." Both, it hardly bears mentioning, are intoxicated.
This tableau, naughtily comic and psychologically unsettling, offers an accurate snapshot of the novel, a work that invites comparisons to Shakespeare's madcap comedies. Characters meet in exotic settings where they fall in love, undergo transformations and endure sudden reversals before returning to the real world. The key difference is that, whereas Shakespearean comedies end in weddings, Johnson's characters are trying to get divorced.
“The Speed of Mercy” is a slow-burn, content to gradually insinuate itself into the reader’s consciousness, with the cool, building intensity of a shared dream. It’s a singularly powerful piece of work.
This tremendous volume offers the most detailed explication of how a movie is made that I have ever read. But Glenn Frankel’s book is much more than the story of a landmark film from 1969. Its many pleasures include a splendid cultural history of mid-20th-century Britain and New York, a concise account of the Hollywood blacklist and a brilliant double biography of the two closeted gay men most responsible for the creative energy of the movie, which is not just Frankel’s subject, but his inspiration.
Be forewarned John Colapinto’s “This is the Voice” may result in spontaneous episodes of the reader’s jaws dropping, lips pursing, tongue flicking and lungs expelling quick pulses of air.
That’s because this wonderfully detailed examination of the human voice implicitly encourages the reader to actively experience what the author learned.
Gay Bar exemplifies the multidimensionality Lin admires: it’s at once erotically gamey and intellectually playful, combining soft porn with social theory, semen with semiotics. “Being homo,” as Lin smartly puts it, “did not amount to being the same.” No, it also licenses you to be different or, in Lin’s case, to be utterly unique.
there’s two ways to be a Mexican writer
that we’ve discovered so far.