Books and Ideas

The Forgotten Oscar The Forgotten Oscar

In the run-up to Sunday's Oscar ceremony the focus was on Elia Kazan and whether the Motion Picture Academy was doing the right thing by honoring him with a Lifetime Achievement ...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Victor Navasky

Shud He Have Been a Contendah? Shud He Have Been a Contendah?

The inevitable controversy--presenting name-naming film director Elia Kazan with a Lifetime Achievement Award--has unfolded like an accident waiting to happen, aggravating the A...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Cliff Rothman

Part of Our Time, Too Part of Our Time, Too

Given the late Dalton Trumbo's various claims to verbal fame--highest-paid screenwriter of his day, most vocal member of the Hollywood Ten, polemicist extraordinaire, winner und...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Dalton Trumbo and Murray Kempton

Red Fox? Red Fox?

The contracts are signed, the treatment is being written and Fox Television plans to fast-track production on a ten- to twelve-hour miniseries based on lefty historian Howard Zin...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Tom Gogola

Montale as Couplet Montale as Couplet

The publication of Jonathan Galassi's translation and meticulous annotation of Eugenio Montale's Collected Poems, 1920-1954 has been justifiably celebrated on both sides of the ...

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Michael Mewshaw

Feminine Mystiquers Feminine Mystiquers

For Danielle Crittenden, the "click" came when she was going to play tennis with her husband and a couple of acquaintances. She left her racket on one side of the court.

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Kim Phillips-Fein

Soul Survivor of Auschwitz Soul Survivor of Auschwitz

During a wide-ranging conversation I had with Primo Levi in his home in Turin in the summer of 1985, two years before his death, I asked him what effect Auschwitz had on him as a...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Gabriel Motola

Kazan and the Bad Times Kazan and the Bad Times

Dalton Trumbo, a militant blacklisted screenwriter and novelist, commenting on the fifties struggle against government attempts to throttle the American left, said that in that b...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Arthur Miller

A Partisan’s Review A Partisan’s Review

In A Partisan View, one of the many memoirs in which score-settling refugees from the glory days of the anti-Stalinist, pro-Modernist quarterly bite each other on their kneecap...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Spice Grrrl Spice Grrrl

On a trip to Russia in 1995 I was told by the young writers I met there that when a certain famed Soviet novelist returned to his native land, he was an offensive anachronism to th...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Eileen Myles

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