If you have ever lived in a small town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s darkest secrets, then Amgash, Illinois and its cast of characters will seem really familiar to you. In a series of short stories, Elizabeth Strout moves from one character to another — most of the time the people in the tales being told are linked by blood or friendship, and so over the course of about a year, the lives of Strout’s characters weave together, with Strout checking back […]
“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Hedy Lamarr was a fascinating woman. She was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, and she truly was gorgeous, but she was also brilliant, creative, and confident. Not that men wanted her for anything but her looks while she was alive. Hedy was born in Vienna in 1914 to a wealthy banker and his wife. She knew from a young age that she wanted to be an actress, and by the time she was a teenager, she was on the stage. After […]
Flâneuse-ing
This book wasn’t what I expected. It begins with the definition of the French word flâneur: a man with the money and time to wander aimlessly around the city, taking in the spectacle of it all. Women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, excluded from the activity of aimless wandering…although not all women submitted to this exclusion. Elkin’s book is about these women — writers, photographers, painters, directors — but it’s also about Elkins herself, a writer from the suburbs of […]
Scary Stories for Adults
When I was a kid, I was scared of my bathroom because I thought a monster lived behind the shower curtain. The movie “Tremors” made me believe that a giant mutant worm from outer space was going to come through the floor and eat me. I closed my door every night before I went to bed because I just knew something lurked in the hallway outside (it was the same thing that lived behind the shower curtain, incidentally). As an adult, I am scared that I […]