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Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find spinning in a drugstore rack. More
The Irish entertainer is known for his freewheeling talk show, but in his novel “Home Stretch” he explores what it’s like for a gay man to return to his home and find both it and himself wholly transformed.Graham Norton has been a saucy mainstay of British entertainment for so long that it is hard to imagine him doing anything else. Talk-show host, radio presenter, Eurovision Song Contest frontman, “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK” judge, he is known for being quick, empathetic and outrageous, and for relishing nothing more than a good dirty anecdote. More
The director deftly constructs a dialogue between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.Merging two biographies is a solid way to enliven the often-tedious genre of the literary documentary. But the connections drawn in “Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation” are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.The director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams to construct a dialogue between them, using the writing and appearances they left behind. Jim Parsons reads Capote’s words in voice-over and Zachary Quinto reads Williams’s. (There is a lengthy list of sources at the end; all credit to a documentary that shows its work.) For the visuals, Vreeland relies principally on archival material. Her most striking conceit is to show the writers in separate but parallel interviews with David Frost.We hear the Southern-born authors on their writing habits, on how autobiography inflects their narratives, on their homosexuality and on substance abuse. They express disappointment with films adapted from their work: Williams felt the censorship was so heavy you often needed to see the stage version for comprehension. Capote says Paramount “double-crossed” him by casting Audrey Hepburn (whom he nevertheless praises) instead of Marilyn Monroe in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”There is some bite in stories of their rivalry. (Capote apparently stung Williams with his description of a Williams-like character in his unfinished novel “Answered Prayers.”) “An Intimate Conversation” never quite digs beyond the cultivated personas of either author — a drawback of the archival format. But for anyone invested in the writers, it offers a vivid sketch.Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate ConversationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee. More
The comedian’s first book, “She Memes Well,” balances jokes, autobiography and serious thoughts about the state of the country.When she began drafting her first collection of essays, Quinta Brunson wasn’t sure she had anything meaningful to say. More
LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More
Created by the artist Sophia Al-Maria, the new series resituates Nin’s erotic short story collection in 1955 Morocco, a year before the country threw off its colonialist yoke.The French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” can resonate differently in an on-screen Moroccan setting. Most famous, perhaps, is the “Casablanca” version, in which the clientele of Rick’s Café sing it loud and proud to drown out the voices of the occupying Germans. More
Activists are trying to preserve the prison he was sent to after his conviction for “indecency,” saying his life is an important part of Britain’s history.READING, England —-The metal stairway creaks and groans underfoot on the way to cell C. 3.3, a bare oblong room of painted brick behind a large and forbidding prison door.It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”“You feel goose bumps going in there,” said Matt Rodda, a lawmaker representing part of this town, around 40 miles west of London, who compared the prison — closed on health and safety grounds in 2013 — to a time capsule.But few have seen the prison, which is rarely opened to the public, and moves to turn it into a public space have reached an impasse.Last month a 2.6 million pound bid — the equivalent of $3.7 million — from the municipality, Reading Council, to buy and convert the prison into a museum and arts center was rejected as too low by the government, which owns the property.Several movie stars, including the Reading-born actress Kate Winslet, support plans to open the site as — seemingly — does the street artist Banksy, one of whose murals is said to appear on one of the prison walls.“It’s got tremendous potential,” said Karen Rowland, a councilor in Reading with special responsibility for cultural issues, who is originally from New York and thinks the location is of importance not only as an artistic and cultural asset.Matt Rodda MP, the Labour Party member of parliament for Reading East (R), and Heritage consultant Karen Rowland (L), at the site of the Victorian jail and the ancient Reading Abbey.Mary Turner for The New York Times“Doubling that with LGBTQ+ interest, and having come from living right next to Stonewall in New York City, I know the value and the importance of a national heritage site for that community,” she said, referring to the Greenwich Village bar in New York credited as the starting place of the gay rights movement.The town of Reading proved to be an important place in the life of Oscar Wilde, a celebrated literary figure until 1895, when he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in London and subsequently convicted of “gross indecency.” When he was transferred from a prison in London to Reading Gaol, it was supposed to be an improvement in his conditions. But prison rules still forbade most social interaction, the food was appalling and the sanitation worse.For an aesthete and sybarite like Wilde, incarceration was a crushing change of fortune depicted vividly in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which he wrote after his release. It recounts the fate of an inmate who was hanged in the prison grounds.“Each narrow cell in which we dwellIs a foul and dark latrine,And the fetid breath of living DeathChokes up each grated screen,And all, but Lust, is turned to dustIn Humanity’s machine”Gyles Brandreth, a writer, broadcaster, actor and former lawmaker who is honorary president of the Oscar Wilde Society, said the prison symbolized Wilde’s place in global literary, cultural and social history and needed to be saved.“There are not many literary figures whose life as well as their work plays a part in the national story, and indeed in the international story,” he said. “We are fascinated by his rise and by his fall and, because of the extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexuality over the century, he also has a place in social history. What we get in Reading Gaol is that transition from triumph to tragedy.”The Oscar Wilde gate outside the perimeter wall of the Victorian jail in Reading, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWilde’s situation in jail eventually improved when a new prison governor granted him access to more books and to writing paper. With that he was able to complete “De Profundis,” a lengthy letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, that included some more optimistic messages.“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” he wrote, citing his plank bed, loathsome food, hard labor, the “dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame.”He added, “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.”In that spirit, those seeking to convert the jail believe that Reading, too, can turn the suffering of its former prisoners to something beneficial to the public. Local campaigners include Toby Davies, artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which in 2016 performed a play about the trial of Oscar Wilde in the chapel of the prison.“It was extraordinary, it will live with me for ever,” he said. “It’s a cliché, but it really does get in your blood, it is so dark and miserable — it feels like The Shawshank Redemption when you are in there. But as a result, there is something massively positive that comes out of that, that you think this is an opportunity for good.”Toby Davies, the artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which performed a play about Wilde’s trial at the prison in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesReading Council’s bid for the site also aims to show off other aspects of the history of a town that was the burial place of King Henry I in 1136 but is arguably better known to most Britons for its big rail station.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, said its plan would focus on arts and culture, accentuate the history of the jail — where Irish Republican prisoners were also held in the early 20th century — but also draw visitors to a neighboring site where King Henry I is buried.The precise location of the tomb has not been identified; it might be under a parking lot, as happened with Richard III in Leicester. Reading Abbey was largely destroyed in the 16th century and parts of it have been built over, though many ruins remain.Mr. Page, of Reading Council, said the Ministry of Justice, which owns Reading Prison, appeared to want around double the council’s bid for the site. That, he said, was unrealistic because it was based on prepandemic valuations and incorrect assumptions, made in an unsuccessful private sector bid, that planning laws would permit significant housing to be constructed on the site.Reading Council’s current proposal includes a much smaller amount of home-building and a boutique hotel, to help finance the conversion of the prison into a museum and arts center.Given that the site is costing the government around £250,000 a year to mothball, Mr. Page is frustrated that the ministry plans to put the site back on sale rather than enter into talks with him.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, at Reading Civic Center.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn a statement, the ministry said that “following discussions with the Council, the prison will be put back on the property market. Any sale will seek the best value for taxpayers and be reinvested into the justice system, while ensuring planning requirements for the historic site are met.”Campaigners have not given up yet, however. Mr. Rodda, the local lawmaker, wants a meeting with the government and said he hoped that other finance, perhaps from crowd funding, could top up the council’s bid.Like some others he is unenthusiastic about the council’s plans to build a boutique hotel on the site of a prison where many suffered and some died. Mr. Davies, the theater director, feels the same, though he thinks that it might be a price worth paying to transform a symbol of brutal penal servitude into one of culture and opportunity.That, he added, would be “an extraordinarily positive message from a town that has been associated with a train station, and shopping, and not much more.” More
