Posts by author
Kevin Nolan
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Sam’s Casual Reading
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 was published recently by Cambridge University Press, and on its blog the publisher has compiled a list of books Beckett read during those years, culled from his letters, with commentary from the…
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Debutantes in Distress
Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.
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Memory Art in Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Memory is a protean thing. There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but…
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Never That Young
“I have all the habits of someone who lived [in New York City] in the ’70s,” Fran Lebowitz tells City Room. “Which is that, if I have a pencil, I have a death grip on it. I see the people…
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Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham, longtime fashion photographer at The New York Times, is the subject of a new documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, and what an enchanting film it is.
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On Reading Civil Complaint No. 11-2472, Tasini v. AOL Inc. et al.
A week ago the labor writer and activist Jonathan Tasini filed a $105-million lawsuit in United States District Court, in New York’s Southern District, against HuffPost’s new owner AOL Inc., and HuffPost co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, seeking to “vindicate…
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Literary Knuckleballer
Baseball’s spring training—really winter training—seems pretty superfluous these days. Most players employ personal training staffs, stay in top shape year-round, and hone their skills relentlessly with the aid of the most advanced technologies available. Yet still they arrive at camp…
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Walker Percy: A Documentary Film
In Win Riley’s fine Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Walker Percy’s friends, family, and biographers discuss the life, work, and philosophy of the author of The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Most notable in the film…
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Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden
“I first met Adam Purple in 1978, when journalist Norman Green and I did a story about him for New York Magazine,” says photographer Harvey Wang, in an interview with Vanishing New York. “I found [Adam] to be one of…
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The Windmills of Old New Amsterdam
Fourth Avenue in Manhattan deserves an epitaph, bookseller Walter Goldwater told The New York Times in 1981, for a story about the neighborhood that was then still known as Book Row. “As a book center, the street is gone,” he…
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Washington D.C. Real Estate Advice
At the end of a CNBC post about how U.S. home values have fallen 26% since the 2006 peak, surpassing the drop experienced from 1928 through 1933, there is a link to the Zillow page for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in…
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Fran Recommends (From 1997)
Martin Scorcese’s HBO documentary Public Speaking is about the writer Fran Lebowitz and, judging by the trailer and reviews, it consists mostly of Scorcese filming Lebowitz while she talks, which might be her true métier. If you’ve seen Lebowitz interviewed,…