In her memoirs, Leni Riefenstahl—the German actress and filmmaker famous for her association with Hitler—describes her first and only meeting with her compatriot and colleague Marlene Dietrich: I was struck by her deep, husky voice, which sounded a bit vulgar and suggestive. Maybe she was a little tipsy. I heard her saying loudly, “Why does …
HELLO DECEMBER!
BRING IT ON, WHATEVER IT MAY BE!
My sister LAURA MCPHEE’s photography show at the Benrubi Gallery in Chelsea: THE HOME AND THE WORLD: A VIEW OF CALCUTTA OCTOBER 29 – DECEMBER 12, 2015
LAURA MCPHEE October 29 - December 12, 2015 Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce Laura McPhee’s The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta, the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery, and her first since the gallery relocated to Chelsea in January of this year. McPhee’s images are less an overview of this …
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Clarice Lispector’s “Complete Stories”: Knowing the Unknowable Clarice — My review at Words Without Borders
Of all the eclectic posts on my Web site blog, the one that has consistently received the most views over the years contains two stories by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector translated by the poet Elizabeth Bishop. A link to my post regularly turns up on syllabi all over the world. Since her death in …
“MY BRAIN I’LL PROVE THE FEMALE TO MY SOUL”: ON SHAKESPEARE AND WOMEN My July/August column at Bookslut
In Shakespeare's will, he left the bulk of his estate to his youngest daughter, Susanna; to his wife of 34 years, the woman who stayed home in Stratford to raise their three children while he went off to London to forge a brilliant career, he left his "second best bed." Much scholarly ink has been …
My translation of Quaestio De Centauris: A short story by Primo Levi in The New Yorker fiction issue
"Quaestio De Centauris" is from a collection of short stories I translated by Levi entitled Natural Histories. This, and another collection I translated entitled Flaw of Form, will be included in THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PRIMO LEVI edited by Ann Goldstein and with an introduction by Toni Morrison forthcoming from W.W. Norton in September 2015. Quaestio is …
HOW WOMEN MAKE CAPITALISM POSSIBLE AND OTHER FEMINIST SHADES OF SOCIALISM: ON ELEANOR MARX, MRS ENGELS, AND THE PARIS COMMUNE: My May column at Bookslut
"Not since Mary Wollstonecraft," claims Rachel Holmes in her brilliant biography Eleanor Marx: A Life, had "any woman made such a profound, progressive contribution to English political thought -- and action." In yet another excavation of a crucial historical female figure discarded by our canonical chroniclers to languish in obscurity, Holmes restores the importance of …
A MINIATURE MODEL OF MODERNITY: SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN (my April column at Bookslut)
"It seemed simple enough," writes French author Nathalie Léger in the opening of her extraordinary new book Suite for Barbara Loden -- and the reader immediately knows, whatever it will be, it won't be simple -- "all I had to do was write a short entry for a film encyclopaedia." Her editor tells her: "No …
Jenny McPhee 