TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: DOMESTIC SUSPENSE REDUX My September Column at Bookslut
Sarah Weinman, crime fiction connoisseur and editor of the essential new anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, is admirably doing her utmost to revive, restore, and reinvent the once highly-popular thriller subgenre of Domestic Suspense. Primarily written by women, this fiction penetrates the veneer of familial serenity to the …
In Praise of Asparagus by Marcel Proust
"...but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed--with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that …
Gaming technology meets Architectural History: Walking through the streets of 17th Century Rome with My Sister Sarah
Using a gaming platform (NVis360) and cartographer Giovanni Battista Falda's 1676 map of Rome, Sarah together with architects Jordan Williams and Eric Lewitt has created a virtual version of 17th-century Rome. As you walk the streets, you can hear the bells ringing in St. Peter's Square, listen to the water trickling in Bernini's Fountain of …
UP AND DOWN THE GAZA STRIP WITH DERVLA MURPHY My August Column at Bookslut
There have been many great female travel writers -- Margery Kempe (c. 1373-1438) wrote about her extensive pilgrimages to holy sites in Europe and Asia; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), the wife of the British ambassador at Constantinople, described life among the privileged in the Ottoman Empire; botanist Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) chronicled her travels through …
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THIS IS HOW I FEEL…
ON A GOOD DAY (Greer Garson, Her Twelve Men, 1954) AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ON A BAD ONE: (Jack Nicholson, The Shining, 1980)
EVIL WAS AROUND HER AND THERE WAS NO ESCAPE
JOAN GETS A GREAT–AND CHALLENGING–NEW JOB: CEO OF PARTNERSHIP FOR LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS
People: Villaraigosa Deputy Transitions to New Challenges Posted on LA School Report June 20, 2013 by Ruth Welte One adjective keeps coming up during interviews with education advocates and insiders about Joan Sullivan: Determined. As the Deputy Mayor for Education in Los Angeles for the last three years, Sullivan was determined to keep Mayor Antonio …
THAT DAMNED MOB OF SCRIBBLING WOMEN: My July Column at Bookslut
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter to his publisher in response to the overwhelming success of female writers at the time. Novels such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1849), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1854) by Sara Payson Willis Parton …
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RIVER OF NO RETURN
(Source: julipinup) (photograph by Laura McPhee)
Jenny McPhee 