In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers … to leane over’. England’s introduction to the balcony came over a decade after the first performance of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. When it was staged in the summer of 1596, just before London’s playhouses were closed owing to a resurgence of plague, the exchange now universally known as the ‘balcony scene’ was probably transacted at a window opening onto the backstage ‘tiring house’ of the Shoreditch Theatre. The popular image of Juliet as a bright-eyed teenager in white muslin leaning over a balustrade only began to form a century and a half later, when a balcony first appeared as part of the stage set. By the late 1930s, the museum director Antonio Avena had improvised a ‘tarrasse’ from a marble sarcophagus and retrofitted it to the walls of Via Cappello 23 – putative home of the ‘historical’ Capulets in Verona. Visitors now pose on ‘Juliet’s balcony’ as part of an international pilgrimage that also includes visiting a bronze statue of Shakespeare’s heroine and rubbing her right breast for luck.
The nearest US base in Antarctica was some two hundred miles away. We had been dropped off by a ship two months ago, with all our gear and food, and would be picked up in three more. Our crew of five was the only human presence on this isolated promontory.
Our home was a one-room plywood hut that served as a living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom. We had no internet, no running water, limited electricity. We worked every single day, in all weather: snow, wind, rain, blizzards, gales, hail, sun. Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, weekends, full moon, new moon. We measured and counted, captured and released, tracked and took notes. My job, in essence, was to observe.
Enter British author Jim Crace. His novels, including Quarantine, Being Dead, and The Gift of Stones, imagine a vast range of milieus, eras, and states of consciousness with incredible vividness. Crace visited my MFA program during my second year to do manuscript consultations, and I submitted the first fifty pages of a novel in progress to him—a World War II-era story loosely inspired by my grandmother’s life. I was, of course, hoping for praise and validation. Instead, Crace looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten: “It’s well written. But you don’t seem to be having much fun.”
It can be hard to recall a time when France hated Picasso, who now has museums dedicated to his art and life in Paris, Antibes, Vallauris, and elsewhere. The Paris institution is one of the many that’s now toasting him to mark the 50th anniversary of his death in 1973. And so it is with surprise that many American readers will now greet Annie Cohen-Solal’s Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973, which has at long last arrived stateside, via an English translation by Sam Taylor, two years after its release in France.
The book, along with a related 2021 exhibition based on Cohen-Solal’s research conducted in police archives and elsewhere, got a good amount of attention in France, and this sturdy, unconventional biography of Picasso ought to attract similar recognition here in the US, where we get too much literature about the artist every year, too little of it of any real substance. This book, however, is different. The research presented within is not new—word of Picasso’s surveillance by the French police first emerged 20 years ago—but Cohen-Solal’s take on it is fresh.
“Healthcare remains linked to the question of worthiness.” This stark statement echoes throughout “The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine,” Ricardo Nuila’s attempt to untangle the labyrinthine system of American hospitals and, more crucially, American medical insurance.