notanotherbookreview

  Plum Sykes, the bestselling author of  Bergdorf  Blondes, The Debutant Divorcee,  and  P a rty Girls and Die in Pearls ( my favorite ), skewers the rich and ridiculous in her new novel WIVES LIKE US (Harper Collins, 5/14/24). The heroines are substantial women, the socially ambitious denizens of the hilly British Cotswolds. They command their hereditary estates, amid quaint hamlets,with an eye on the London press.. For these literally entitled British women, being a successful wife means going to fantastic lengths in a quests for excellence. "Keeping up with the Jonses" is a dire competition, where one's brand, a uniquely individual identity, must out-class all competitors. This very social contest pits the heroines of   WIVES LIKE US against the less tasteful or virtuous, yet equally ingenious and perhaps unscrupulous wives of other estates. Of course such expectations, fantastic or not, carry the frisson of risk-- failure and self undoing....

                         Doesn't the Paint Say It All?    DORTHEA TANNING  (KASMIN GALLERY)  " Andre Breton, poet and critic, published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.  Surrealism was to unite conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in 'an absolute reality, a surreality.'  " Brittanica   Dorthea Tanning, known as a surrealist artis, along with her husband, Max Ernest, would not describe her later paintings as surrealism.   But these paintings are akin to the "trance between two worlds" that Breton described as "the magic dictation: of automatic revelation."   Doesn't the Paint Say It All?  DORTHEA TANNING  (KASMIN GALLERY), a  new book about Tanning's later work, examines these singular paintings from  a pivotal one-woman show. ...

 Is magic fantasy, theory, science or lunacy? I was entranced by  M agician and Fool,  the first fantasy novel in Susan Wands' Arcana Oracle Series (Spark Press.) I recently   finished   High Priestess and Empress (April, 2024), the second novel and look forward to the third. Though not a regular reader of fantasy novels nor ones about magic, it's the history, characters and sheer imaginative leaps that I enjoy in this work.   The series, projected to cover the creation of the entire tarot deck, is a challenge. History is the bedrock for this series, enriching the fantasy with depth and plausibility. Then there's the characters, who would be fascinating in any time.  Pamela Coleman Smith (1878-1951) is the artist who created the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck, perhps the most used in the world. Her inspired designs are on display in the collection at NYC's Whitney Museum of Art, as are her colored prints of ocean waves with female spirits. Th...

TCG, Theatre Communications Group, published Tony Kushner's  PERESTROIKA , the second part of Angels of America in 1994 .  Would   book reviewers mention a book of this play, a huge cultural breakthrough?  As a book publicist and playwright, I was excited about this idea, as was the publisher, who created The "Plays are Literature Campaign." Packages of books with materals supporting this book as literature were sent. A couple weeks later, I began my follow-up. Was the exclusion of published playscripts arbitrary? "Everyone knows,  plays are only reviewed  in performance." But in England, play scripts in books are reviewed.  Some are reviewed both IN PERFORMANCE and when the book is published. Why? Playscripts are accepted, like poetry, as a form of  LITERATURE!  The   Plays are Literature Campaign  showed Angels in America was a  unique literary achievement published in two books.   Perestroika was a worthy exc...

  The World of Winslow Homer   ( Time Life  Library  of Art, 1966 ) by John Thomas Flexner shows unpeopled sea and landscapes, humans battling nature with revelatory emotion and technique. A favorite of mine is the watercolor of the  artist's studio, both specific and abstract.  Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was part of The Hudson River School but he also stood apart. Many of these self-taught "Yankee" painters, like Cole, an Englishman, came to paint the pure luminous light of the New World with unknown seasons. Cole, a portrait peddlar, knocked on doors with canvas and art supplies strapped to his back, until he quit to "learn from nature." Homer,  apprenticed to a printer, learned to produce in-depth black and white illustration. After his freedom, he became a  master of watercolors and taught himself to paint "what he saw" in oils.  Surprising to him,  the work sold.   New England light contrasted to a brutal environment, ...

Is "Happily Ever After" a destination, a phantom or beside the point of life?  Carla Malden's My Two and Only  (Rare Bird Books)and Ashley Griffin's The Spindle   (Oaklea Books) address this question from points of view human and otherworldly.  Carla Malden's novel is a deceptively quiet book about adults in Los Angeles' middle class, distanced from the media drumbeats of apocalypse--climate disaster, homelessness, nuclear war. (There is no mention of AI).  The environment, business are topics but the real concern is family--what makes one?  How do you keep the heart, that most essential pulse of people's lives, beating when your most essential human dies?  Dysfunction here is less about psychology, than the crucial adjustment a human being makes when their "One and Only" dies. When it happens in an accident both everyday and strange, it leaves much to the imagination. For twelve years Charlotte lives with the "what ifs." Yet she's ...