Saving America from the Comstock Act and other repressive remnants of the 19th-century past
Alexandra Marshall
Alexandra Marshall has published five novels and a previous work of nonfiction. Her most recent book, a memoir, is The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide.
Posted inFeatures
The Prince Is Dead. Long Live the Prince.
On multiple video monitors at his Manhattan apartment in the Hotel Elsinore, the modern Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) mesmerizes himself with his own distressed image. At Blockbuster Video, he rents action films by the dozen, all the better to create his frightening movie-within-a-movie that is his version of the play wherein he’ll “catch the conscience of […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
A dissenting opinion on American Beauty.
Posted inFeatures
Inside John Malkovich
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was forecast by his 1938 novel La Nausee, in which a solitary named Antoine Roquentin, in the privacy of his journal, analyzes the agony of his existence: “La nausee … c’est moi.” The comedy Being John Malkovich opens with a similarly pain-infused intimacy, in a stunning solo “Dance of Despair […]
Posted inFeatures
Word of Mouth
A decade after Abbie Hoffman had first set the hairstyle for a generation, he showed up on a television talk show with a radically short haircut and the explanation that, once Tab Hunter was wearing his hair long, Hoffman knew it had come time to cut his own. By this logic, now that an off-Broadway […]
