The pantheon of horror fiction has included several prominent women authors, from Mary Shelley to Daphne du Maurier and Anne Rice. But it has long been a man’s game, usually told from a man’s perspective. When male horror writers’ main characters are women, they’re often prototypical Good Moms, rather than fully realized people—that is,…
There are a few universal truths about divorce. It’s always unequal, with one person doing the leaving and the other person being left. It’s a legal headache, from the dissolution of the relationship to the division of everything from assets to furniture, to financial entanglements like alimony and child support. If there are kids…
Earlier this month, a friend of mine urgently texted me: “You do tai chi, right? A director is filming a movie in Stockbridge and she needs people to do tai chi at a cemetery. I recommended you.” Now, I do not, in fact, do tai chi, but I get this a lot because…
Kyle Abraham is looking for something. The multi-award-winning choreographer and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, whose company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, makes its mainstage debut at Jacob’s Pillow this week, brings his signature search for identity and struggle with personal and societal emotional trauma to a packed, five-dance program. The performance begins with state, an…
Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different was critically well received when it was released in 2016, though fans of her previous, rapturously lauded novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, weren’t quite as taken with the story. Many cited its similarities to Bernadette—the frustrated creative at its center, the skewering of a faux-woke Seattle, the upper-middle-class…
Happiness is tricky. It’s something we all want, but it often feels just out of reach—that if we do this, buy that, go there, we’ll find it, wrapped and waiting like a birthday gift. The fleeting, often elusive quality of happiness lies at the center of The Happiness Project, a 2016 work by Dutch-born…
Akram Khan doesn’t just perform his dances; he lives them. In Xenos, which played to a packed audience on February 21 at the Williams College ’62 Center for the Arts, he isn’t just a formidable dancer, but also a skilled actor adept at storytelling through explosive movement, small gestures, and poignant moments of stillness….
The dance world has been slow to let go of certain stereotypes. Chief among them might just be that men shouldn’t dance en pointe, and that romantic love is best expressed by men and women dancing together. Which is one of the reasons that Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the 45-year-old, New…
Popular debut novels are an intriguing phenomenon, often the book equivalent of an ingénue who notches a surprising win at the Oscars every decade or so. Some are deserving—think Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God—and some are, to put it nicely, puzzling (Anna Paquin in The Piano, anyone?). The Woman in the…
On some level, it must suck to create a work of great innovation or genius. Though you’re forever lauded for and associated with that work, everything else you do is also compared to it in perpetuity, and generally found lacking. Such is the case for Markus Zusak, Australian YA writer, whose 2005 novel The…