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“... the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning for Paris’, and in September 1939 arrived in Manhattan by Greyhound bus. She enrolled at Columbia, embarking on a doctorate in 17th-century literature but soon dropping out ...”

“... Young Adult series, got in on the action with an instalment called Kristy and the Secret of Susan. (The secret was that Susan was autistic.) Appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show shortly after Rain Man opened, Ruth Sullivan, the doyenne of American parent advocates, said that the movie had ‘advanced the field of ...”

“... a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The ...”

“... proclivity for ‘multiplication and archiving’ to gay taste in New York, which in ‘the bleak McCarthy era paradoxically flourished in the home’. In this ‘domestic avant-gardism’ public signs were ironised in private ways that ‘interrupted the distinction’ between the two spheres. Such customising of images is close to ‘camp’ as defined by ...”

“... seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a ...”

“... writing this ‘half-arsed book’. If writers need to be ‘interested in everything’ – as Susan Sontag once said – when do they ever get time off? Loafing, getting stoned, hanging about on sun-kissed café terraces: for most people, such things are rare, and about the best that life can offer (Dyer also writes, frequently and unruffledly, about ...”

“... it remains for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do ...”

“... life he led with his wife Elena and various other members of his family (and ex-family like Mary McCarthy), The Sixties is brimming over with accounts of visits with and from lots of important and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James ...”

“... of Charlotte Brontë and Poe – or, according to the recent feminist work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, of women’s writing generally. Lurie incorporates this idea among her other symbolic and literary motifs, leaving them all in the sub-plot and, as it were, in quotation-marks. The nuanced and naturalistically-observed middle-aged love affair between ...”

“... many years too late, as such audits always are. And then we have the freelance testimony of Susan Rosenstiel, wife of the mobbed-up ‘businessman’ and swinger Lewis Rosenstiel, one of Hoover’s many and sweaty connections to the high life of organised crime. At a session with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly ...”

“... Joyce’. The latter is a manifesto of blasting and blessing whose villains include Mary McCarthy, for limiting her ‘medium’ (McLuhan’s word) to the ‘socially minded’ novel, the nouveaux romanciers for being ‘leaden’ and ‘humourless’, and the conventional short story for its devotion to the ‘mousetrap’ capture of ‘a tiny ...”

“... of their East Hampton hammocks signing up biographies of high-profile authors such as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer (three thus far, along with a memoir by one of his former wives, with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie authors than books by ...”

“... Nelson is getting introduced to them: Catherine Opie and A.L. Steiner, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, Ryan Trecartin and Mike Kelley, Nao Bustamante and William Pope.L. Nelson spends less time on work that, in her view, is stupid, arrogant or exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil ...”

“... something he witnessed only once in the making of Citizen Kane, when Kane wordlessly destroys Susan Alexander’s apartment. As Callow explains, a storm of pent-up violence was released in him as he staggered about the set, not entirely executing the right moves, smashing the furniture. As he came off the set, clutching the hand he had accidentally cut ...”

“... isolated but terrorised. The whole business was one long test of character. McGahern praises a Mrs McCarthy, the librarian in his local town of Ballinamore, ‘an unusual woman for her time’ who placed his first book, The Barracks, under the counter in 1963 and lent it to anyone who requested it (the library committee was more enthusiastic than the ...”