Dear reader,
Living in this city can be a random, unlisted encounter with great and good things. A happy, humane novelist as a stand clam in the Yankees game. At the bagel store, a disgraceful former governor who looks totally devoured.
Of course, true New Yorkers metabolize these moments and incorporate cool cucumbers in the face of everyone except the most outrageous confusion (professional sports rivals, perhaps, or the actual Beetle). Still, I never get bored of the low wort zing that those run-ins can add to everyday and colorless days, just like I find flamingos on the subway.
In literature, like life, a clever writer can do the same thing, stealing famous real historical figures – the kinds in which subjective energy usually fills the room – and weaves them neatly into the stories of others.
They are welcomed from very different genres, identities and perspectives, but both books here approach the cameos of famous people with satisfying restraint.
– Lee
This is a bit of an internal job. Breuard worked as a book critic and editor for the New York Times until his death in 1990 at the age of 70.
“Kafka Was Anger” recalls his time as GI, who became downtown Gadfly in the late 1940s, was looking for a better life through postwar cheap rents and Czech existentialists. In Greenwich Village, he finds art history “in their eyes” through poets, Wastrell and the entire cute Ivy League coed playground.
A girl he calls Sheri Donatti – a light scrim in the pseudonym of painter, poet, Muse Sheri Martinelli – offers to show him his apartment in the tenement building on Jones Street. Instead, he quickly ended up in her bed.
Sheri's cramped walk-up was filled with her abstract canvas, but her main art project looked like her own life. Even the food, conversation, and sexual encounters were works of obscure performances that Bloyard felt confused and conventionally. Still, sex! So he went in.
For such a hard kick, there were new schools (including American cultural courses taught by the very German Elich Fromm), as well as long classes in bookstores and watering holes drawn by other young Strevers in the village.
Broillard heroes are often as close as they are in these places as the next bar stool. He recalls seeing her distracted crashing with Sheri at an aesthetic store. “Perhaps he was just wearing an espadrill, so he was walking curiously” – and he had a nasty night with a decline, but still rather rodent anisnin. (“I couldn't imagine her in bed with Henry Miller, but that might have been his fault.”)
Afternoon shopping for suits at Delmore Schwartz and the Brooks Brothers, followed by several surprising field trips to Harlem Dance Hall. Caught in a drunken standoff between Dylan Thomas and his “angry intellectual milkmaid” wife, Kaitlyn, Broyard wisely made excuses from the couple's attempts to seduce him in a Chelsea hotel room.
“Kafka Was Anger” comes into an interesting thing about gender roles as the book ends somewhat abruptly, as it moves into a softer, more reflexive realm with the sudden loss of a friend. Broyard had planned the rest of his Bohemian Rhapsody, the Postscript states, but died before he finished it.
Hunting old copies of abstract expressionism, kitchen bathtubs, partisan reviews.
Available from Knopf Doubleday or from the bookshelves of people who have smoked cigarettes in high school.
“I'm an idiot who wants you,” Camila Sosa Villarada
Fiction, 2022
“I Want You” (translated from the Spanish language of Kit Mode), the majority of Sosa Villarada's first story collection, is set among the marginalized characters in or near her indigenous Argentina – sex workers, percent children, victims of the Spanish inquisition – and magical realism (a small piece of generation, speaking fox)
The title story is a lovely outlier, and a throwback to New York in the 1950s, told by a Mexican hairdresser named Maria (born Carlos). Just as trans women are trying to pass – they prefer the term travelie, but police and cruel strangers tend to use different languages. One night, at Harlem Speak Easy, they find an unlikely ally: Billie Holiday. They know her name, if not her music: “There's no point in lying. We didn't really like jazz. It's so boring and a beloved person.”
Lonely and artistically obstructed – after being appointed in prison for drug possession, ambiguous urban laws prevent her from playing her – Billy decides that Maria and Ava are girls of her kind. She offers her charm, hydroponic weeds, and clothes from her back. They supply safe shelters and homemade poses.
Louis Armstrong, Tallurer Bankhead and Sarah Vaughn also mainly float in background colour. The holiday was as big a star as any of them, but her hopes and Scalor mix fits Sosa Villarada's non-fit band. Seeing her for the first time on stage, Maria finally understands her friend: “I'm also a strange fruit.”
Read it if you like: White satin rhinestones, the 2017 Chilean film “A Fantastic Woman.”
Available: other presses in the US, and perhaps a good drag brunch gift bag.
Why…
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