The founder of Rolling Stone magazine always had a baby face, but he was never timid. His own mother told him he was the most difficult child she’d ever encountered. He edited stories with a red pen. He gave out roach clips with subscriptions. He turned a darkroom into an in-house drug-dealing operation called the Capri Lounge, as a perk for staffers.
“More than anyone I know, he’s always just done what he wanted,” said his friend Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.”
There is a Spanish word for venting one’s feelings, desahogar, which when translated literally means “to un-drown.” To pour one’s heart out. To cry until there is no need to cry anymore.
In Angie Cruz’s fourth novel, “How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water,” an interviewer with an employment assistance program in New York asks protagonist Cara Romero to say something about herself. What follows feels, at first, like an un-drowning.
Jamie Ford’s new novel is part historical fiction, part feminist fiction, part science fiction and totally captivating.
“The Many Daughters of Afong Moy” grabs the reader’s attention from the beginning and holds it through generations of a mythical family that jumps to life on these pages.
The Royal Academy of Art has never hosted a solo exhibition by a woman in their main space. The National Gallery was founded in 1824 and held its first major solo exhibition by a female artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, in 2020. The first edition of EH Gombrich’s supposedly definitive The Story of Art featured no female artists in its first edition in 1950 – and one woman in its 16th edition. In 2015, the curator and art historian Katy Hessel “walked into an art fair and realised that, out of the thousands of artworks before me, not a single one was by a woman”.
And so she created this positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women. Starting in 1500 and shooting through to artists born in the 1990s, The Story of Art Without Men brings centuries-old figures to life while giving form and gravitas to emergent voices and covering every substantial movement from dadaism to civil-rights-era antiracist art along the way.
Magpies fly from branch to branch. In the slow
tide of the afternoon, you sleep in my arms;
we drift to shore, as sea turtles beach;