Ah, yes, those opinions. Sontag was celebrated both for her own strong opinions and those that she inspired. So it was inevitable that her biography would do the same—act, in effect, as a proxy for what everyone wanted to say about Sontag by allowing them to contest what should or should not have been said about her by her biographer. I wondered how he had coped with all that.
“Those strong feelings were exactly what I dreaded when I was first asked to do this book, and I decided I didn’t care,” he said. “If I had cared, I couldn’t have written the book.”
When Alan Donnes, the first of the last three leaders of National Lampoon not to be sentenced to prison, joined the company, five years ago, he discovered that it was a magnet for off-the-wall film pitches. One day, he took a call from a guy who knew a guy with $5 million and a script for “the perfect National Lampoon movie.” “It always scares me when they say, ‘It’s the perfect National Lampoon movie,’ ” Donnes said, sitting in his office at National Lampoon headquarters, in Los Angeles.
Of all the senses, taste, inextricably linked to smell to awaken flavors, is the perhaps most evocative in its ability to conjure memories of time and place. I am fortunate to have roamed the world, both for work and play, and my kitchen holds the bounty of this wandering, letting me relive a globe-trotting that has halted with the pandemic.
Peter Ho Davies, who teaches writing at the University of Michigan, is well known for his literary achievements. Winner of several prestigious awards, he has published two short-story collections and two previous historical novels. In his latest offering, “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself,” he attempts something new: an unnamed third-person narrator, a contemporary story delivered in the fashion of a prose-poem, and a meandering style. It is a candid look at fatherhood, the stresses a family undergoes when a child is born and difficult choices one must make in life, as well as the shame that can result.
When did “fitness” become a pastime in itself, an interest separated from any particular physical activity? When people employ a “personal trainer”, what are they training for? What is the thing for which they must sweat to attain a state of perpetual readiness? And when did “fitness” become not just a physical but a moral good, the obligatory aim of every citizen? Luckily this book enables one to approach such mysteries from the comfort of one’s armchair.