At the far Eastern edge of Beirut tucked away behind a flower shop is the intimate, exquisite Tawlet Souk el Tayeb , a restuarant where each day a chef from a different region of Lebanon offers his or her best dishes spread out in a glorious buffet. Hotel Albergo, located in the beyond chic art-deco …
A Beautiful Book: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood in a new Folio Society edition illustrated by the extraordinary Balbusso sisters
Fully revised with an introduction by the author this exquisite edition is an object of beauty in language and image, an exemplar of all that is possible, past, present, and future. In The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, humanity's reproductive ability has been so compromised by nuclear disasters, chemical warfare, industrial toxins, and contaminated …
My January Column at Bookslut: “Larry Summers Eat Your Heart Out: Hollywood Bombshell Hedy Lamarr Invented A Sophisticated Weapons Technology Between Films”
What do Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Mary Anning, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Jocelyn Bell, Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin, and Hedy Lamarr (among others) have in common? They each made extraordinary scientific discoveries that went unrecognized because they were women, many of them having to endure male colleagues taking credit for their work, then …
Baby It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Me, Esther Williams, Ricardo Montalban, Red Skelton, and Betty Garrett
Listen and watch here to Baby It's Cold Outside from Neptune's Daughter
Dopplegängers: Mary Shelley and Muriel Spark
Mary Shelley died on February 1, 1851. On February 1, 1918, Muriel Spark was born. The two writers shared the same initials. Their last names, under which they wrote, were assumed from husbands. Both wound up single mothers of an only son and both suffered chronic financial worries. These coincidences, for someone with Muriel Spark’s …
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May Your Turkey Be A Big One! (and a little recommended reading for the day)
Recommended reading: "The Turkey" by Flannery O'Connor and "The Turkey Season" by Alice Munro
Magic in Modern London
An Amulet for Breastfeeding Mothers Who needs the Leche League when a seahorse will do? The Welcome Collection in London has a wonderful exhibit of amulets from Edward Lovett's extraordinary collection of which this seahorse is one. Lovett (1852-1933) was Chief Cashier at The Bank of Scotland in the City of London but whenever he …
Eloise Grows Up: The Charmed Life of the Charming Rosamond Bernier
Like that clever, witty, audacious inhabitant of the Plaza Hotel, the notorious children's book heroine Eloise, Rosamond Bernier acquits herself in every situation, no matter how extraordinary, with a grand measure of aplomb. Zelig style, Bernier cruised through the greater part of the twentieth century hobnobbing with the western hemisphere's best and brightest artists, writers, …
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Happy Halloween via “Frankenstein Created Woman”
Italian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and my great friend Livia Manera on Philip Roth, French intellectual impotence, and the failure of French Feminism (in Italian, English tk, and I get a mention)
Phillipe Sollers and Alain Finkielkraut In the op-ed below published in today's Corriere Della Sera, Manera paints a hilarious, if pathetic, portrait of a scene on a French tv show in which a prominent author--Alain Finkielkraut--expresses his dismay over her documentary on Philip Roth, "Roth on Roth" (click here for NYTimes review) which he admits he hasn't actually seen but has heard …
Jenny McPhee 