She was a twenty-two year old Fulbright scholar from New York fleeing her immigrant Italian family’s claustrophobic love, he was a thirty-eight year old Catholic priest from the city’s Irish tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, researching... Read More

Shrewdly capitalizing on the marquee recognition factor of Shakespeare in Love, Charney, Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, has compiled a briskly... Read More

This is a strangely sad and compelling memoir, like a story told at a bar frequented by artists. In the summer of 1976 a local boy hitches a ride from a white Mercedes convertible. The austere smiling woman in the passenger seat is... Read More

In the cultural trade between Canada and America, it’s usually American pop culture that sells. Canada has purer air and water, a slight moral superiority and Toronto as a frequent film stand-in for Manhattan, but America seems to own... Read More

A cogent and engrossing social history of the evolving Medieval attitudes toward civic and erotic love, virtue and spiritual friendship, Ennobling Love draws upon a rich tradition of texts to exhume a historical sensibility. From an... Read More

In the spirit of his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that was to prefigure his singular influence on twentieth-century art criticism, Greenberg’s Homemade Esthetics is an engrossing coda to his career (he died in 1994)... Read More

The renaissance of Virginia Woolf still blooms. Successively reborn into our polemical age of interdisciplinary feminist studies, her witty and passionate rebellion against Victorian/Edwardian cultural, literary and sexual patriarchy has... Read More

Call it “No Byyys Allowed.” In this sampling from four now out-of-print volumes of her poetry, Marge Piercy has dedicated it to “grrrl” power, the we-are-woman roar of the zines and poetry slams generation, that is, for the... Read More