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      Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

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      Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More

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      Beatles Biographer Grapples With the ‘Paradox’ of George Harrison

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      Philip Norman, the author of books about Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the Beatles as a group, discovers that Harrison was, among other things, a puzzle.In a new biography, Philip Norman writes about the “paradox” of George Harrison, a man who was “unprecedentedly, ludicrously, suffocatingly famous while at the same time undervalued, overlooked and struggling for recognition.”This was the central contradiction that made Harrison, the composer of classics like “Here Comes the Sun,” and “Taxman,” a fascinating figure, both as a Beatle and after the band broke up, as Norman explores in his book “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle.” Norman tackled his latest subject after writing celebrated biographies of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, as well as “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation,” a book that Harrison was critical of.Harrison lived several separate lives. He was a rock star. A follower of Hinduism. A prolific film producer who came close to financial ruin. A philanderer who had an affair with a former bandmate’s wife and once had a guitar duel with Eric Clapton (also the subject of a Norman biography) over Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s first wife, whom Clapton fancied and later married.Scribner“The complexity of his character was something that hadn’t really been noticed before,” Norman said, adding, “Actually taking the whole elusive man, a bundle of different personalities, that was what was fascinating.”Norman discussed his approach to Harrison in a recent interview.This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Britain’s Friendliest Bear to Hit the Stage in ‘Paddington: The Musical’

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      The star of a long-running book series and two films will hit the stage in a show currently being developed in Britain, producers said.Paddington, the well-traveled bear known for his floppy red hat and love for orange marmalade sandwiches, is taking on yet another venture in 2025: the theater.A stage musical about the friendly bear is in development and is set to open in Britain in 2025, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday. It will be adapted from the book series that made him famous, as well as the two live-action films, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.”The working title is “Paddington: The Musical,” and it “is currently undergoing a period of development and workshops,” according to a news release.Paddington was first introduced in a book series by Michael Bond that follows the good-natured bear who emigrates from Peru to England and is taken in by the Brown family. Paddington is sweet, curious and prone to mishaps.The first book in the series, “A Bear Called Paddington,” was published in October 1958. More than 35 million copies of Paddington books have been sold worldwide.The live-action feature films, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington, premiered in Britain in 2014 and 2017. The first film depicts Paddington’s arrival in London and the early stages of his relationship with the Brown family. In the second film, Paddington attempts to get his Aunt Lucy a gift and ends up in prison, where, eventually, there is music, cake and dancing.A third film, “Paddington in Peru,” is set to be released in Britain on Nov. 8, 2024. Its U.S. release date is Jan. 17, 2025.The stage show’s music and lyrics will be written by Tom Fletcher, a founding member of the popular British band McFly and a well-known children’s author. The musical’s book will be by Jessica Swale, whose play “Nell Gwynn” won an Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2016.The musical’s director will be Luke Sheppard, who has worked on “Just for One Day,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Rent.”The musical is being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Studiocanal and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK. The producers did not provide details on the plot and said the cast would be announced later.“The magic of Paddington is that, through his wide-eyed innocence, he sees the very best in humanity,” Ms. Friedman and Ms. Lumley said in a joint statement, “reminding us that love and kindness can triumph if we open our hearts and minds to one another.” More

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      24 Things That Stuck With Us in 2023

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      Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.Art‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick’“October’s Gone…Goodnight,” by Barkley HendricksClark Hodgin for The New York TimesAt the Frick, where Barkley Hendricks’s shimmering ’70s portraits are hanging, posthumously, in the museum’s first solo show by a Black artist, I kept thinking about that Langston Hughes poem: What does happen to a dream deferred? Hendricks didn’t live to see his subjects, with their plentiful Afros and bell-bottom cool, leaping, communing, strolling across the walls of an institution he frequented. But after quietly railing at the omission, I realized the exhibition is actually about Hendricks taking his rightful place — a kind of insistence that a dream, rather than fossilizing, can go on forever. REBECCA THOMASTheater‘The Engagement Party’Given the heaviness of the current news cycle, I was grateful for the respite of Samuel Baum’s confection of a play, “The Engagement Party“ at the Geffen Playhouse. With sharp writing, a first-rate cast and elegant scenery, who says theater isn’t alive and well in Los Angeles? ROBIN POGREBINRap Albums‘Michael’ by Killer MikeIt’s dangerous for an artist to invite André 3000 for a feature, such are his prodigious talent and penchant for outshining anyone on a track. Killer Mike stays with André 3000 on “Scientists & Engineers” and, dare I say, even delivers the better verse, a standout on his well-balanced album, “Michael.” JONATHAN ABRAMSContemporary ArtRagnar Kjartansson at the Louisiana Museum of Modern ArtBefore a trip to Scandinavia, I heard from several people that the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, was their favorite museum in the world. After five hours on the grounds, I understood why. Beyond a robust children’s area and the meditative sculpture gardens, I was transfixed by an exhibition on the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who uses repetition to examine human emotions, motives and desires. JASON M. BAILEYHip-Hop ReunionsThe DA.I.S.Y. Experience at Webster HallDe La Soul’s pioneering rap peers, including KRS-One, Chuck D, DJ Red Alert, Q-Tip, Common and Queen Latifah, all showed up at Webster Hall in March to buoy the remaining members of the group, Maseo and Posdnuos, as they celebrated the long-awaited streaming release of their catalog, just weeks after the death of Trugoy the Dove. Part catalog retrospective, part homegoing celebration, the night was a warm act of community crystallized, for me, in a single gesture: Late in the night, as Posdnuos rapped onstage, a grinning Busta Rhymes clasped him from behind in a hug I haven’t forgotten since. ELENA BERGERONTV‘Fellow Travelers’Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime“Fellow Travelers” bounces between the perils of McCarthy era Washington and the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, examining the country through the lens of the relationship between a finely chiseled, roguish diplomat and the naïve, morally tortured younger man who loves him over three decades. Created by Ron Nyswaner and based on a novel by Thomas Mallon (the book makes a perfect companion piece to the show), it is a political thriller/sizzling romance/slice of history worth waiting up for to catch each new episode as it drops. HELEN T. VERONGOSFolk Albums‘The Greater Wings’ by Julie ByrneJulie Byrne’s third album is earthy and otherworldly at once; a mournful, healing dispatch from somewhere between heaven and the dew-glazed grass around a freshly dug grave. “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings, as synthesizer tones and harp strings melt behind her. GABE COHNCultural Juggernaut‘Barbie’Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesNo one can say “Barbie” was overlooked in 2023, but was it really among the best? Absolutely. It featured a sharp script, even sharper performances, at least three great songs as well as a brilliantly directed showstopping dance sequence. And in a dumpster fire of a year, it brought joy back to the multiplex. STEPHANIE GOODMANTheater‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s play, set almost entirely in a Northern California recording studio in 1976, follows a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band as they lay down tracks for a new album. Sexy, savage and sneakily heartbreaking, it explores the intricacies of communal creation and the sacrifices that art demands and invites. ALEXIS SOLOSKIStreaming K-Drama‘Queenmaker’This South Korean Netflix drama follows Hwang Do-hee (Kim Hee-ae), a former fixer for a corrupt family conglomerate in Seoul who decides to put her might behind the mayoral campaign of a frazzled human-rights lawyer, Oh Kyung-sook (Moon So-ri). Netflix has been investing in K-dramas for a reason. “Queenmaker” presents some delicious commentary on class and entitlement at a time of increasingly visible economic inequality in Korea and in the United States. KATHLEEN MASSARANonfiction‘Status and Culture’“Status and Culture” by W. David Marx I finished W. David Marx’s book “Status and Culture” early in the year, and afterward its point of view about taste and trend cycles felt like it applied to — well, just about everything. If you’re interested in why people (including you!) like the things they like, and why culture in the internet age feels stuck in place, read this. DAVID RENARDAnimated Film‘The Boy and the Heron’We’re lucky to be alive in a time when Hayao Miyazaki is still making hand-drawn animated films. With “The Boy and the Heron,” we have the privilege of following him into another dream world, and there are scenes and sequences so achingly gorgeous they brought me up short. BARBARA CHAIExperimental Theater‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I saw, at 1:30 in the morning, a clown called Julia Masli try to solve her audience’s problems — everything from feeling too hot to being a hypochondriac. It was madcap, but by the show’s euphoric finish, involving a heartbroken audience member being forced to crowd surf to boost their mood, I’d started thinking Masli was better than any therapist and most other comedians. ALEX MARSHALLSeconds after the Opera Ends‘Dead Man Walking’Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher and above in a video in “Dead Man Walking” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI still remember the silence during the final moments of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Dead Man Walking.” To be in such a huge space with so many people, in utter silence — thinking back, I was relieved no one’s phone had rung. LAURA O’NEILLHorror-Comedy‘M3gan’I’m a sucker for art that reflects my greatest fears — bonus points if doused in satire — maybe because it’s evidence that my anxieties aren’t mine alone or maybe because there’s no better way to exorcise dread than to discuss it. Top of my list is the prospect of humanity being conquered by robots (hence my fixation on, say, the “Terminator” movies and “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and in 2023, artificial intelligence seemed to go from peripheral conversations about a future menace to an imminent threat that industry leaders warned may pose a “risk of extinction.” Enter “M3gan,” about a TikTok-dancing, baby-sitting cyborg that managed to be both extraordinary camp and chilling cautionary tale about what could happen when we outsource human emotional care to humanoids who can’t exactly care at all. MAYA SALAMBroadway Revivals‘Parade’Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” is one of my favorite shows, so when I saw his musical “Parade” was returning to Broadway, I knew I had to see it. I didn’t know much about it going in, but I was eager to hear Brown’s wonderfully rhythmic piano phrases live. What I didn’t bank on was a gripping story from the past whose themes still resonate. Micaela Diamond’s powerful singing of “You Don’t Know This Man” was unforgettable — the tragedy with which she imbued every note gave me chills. JENNIFER LEDBURYArtificial IntelligencePlankton SingsA.I.’s depiction in culture this year was almost universally sinister: stealing jobs, spreading misinformation, antagonizing Ethan Hunt. It seems like bad news for humanity, except in one very particular application — generating cover versions of songs sung by cartoon characters. The breakout star of this genre was Plankton from “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He crushes “Even Flow,” he nails “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” but he really shines on “Born to Run.” You’re laughing during the first verse, but by the time he tells Wendy he’ll love her with all the madness in his soul, you really believe. DAVID MALITZOld-School Sci Fi‘2001: A Space Odyssey’In August, I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for just the second time, in 70-millimeter projection at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Afterward, I texted a friend: “Is it just the greatest movie ever made?” MARC TRACYMagic‘Asi Wind’s Inner Circle’My job as the theater reporter comes with an occupational hazard: Everyone I meet asks me what show they (or their mother-in-law, or their neighbor, or some random co-worker) should go see. And throughout this year, my answer has been Asi Wind, a smooth-talking Israeli American magician who has been holed up in a Greenwich Village church gymnasium, astonishing audiences with close-up card trickery and mind-blowing mind reading. His run at the Gym at Judson is to end in mid-January after 444 performances; catch it if you can. MICHAEL PAULSONPodcasts‘The Diary of a CEO’Steven Bartlett is the host of “The Diary of a CEO.” It is not an exaggeration to say that the “Diary of a CEO” podcast has changed my life this year. The host Steven Bartlett poses engaging questions to some of the world’s finest thought leaders, with answers that can truly transform the way you think and the way you take action; all for free, with invaluable results. MEKADO MURPHYIndie Albums‘The Record’ by boygeniusThe boygenius album “The Record,” the full-length debut of the indie supergroup, landed, for me, like a geyser in a parched landscape. Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus were all singular talents whom I’d loved individually, but the way they rode their vocal harmonies through discord, on lyrics and guitar, lashed with humor and vulnerability — I couldn’t get enough. “I want to you to hear my story,” they sing, “and be a part of it.” Ladies, you got it. MELENA RYZIKOne TV Episode‘Long, Long Time’ From ‘The Last of Us’How did a zombie show based on a video game bring me to tears? Episode 3 of HBO’s “The Last of Us” reveals how love can survive and even thrive in the worst of times. The show’s sudden detour away from the violence and infected masses to focus on the life that Bill and Frank have built together is a poignant reminder of what really matters. ROBIN KAWAKAMI`Theater‘Sad Boys in Harpy Land’Alexandra Tatarsky in her solo show “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” at Playwrights Horizon.Chelcie ParryIn this brilliant, semi-autobiographical solo performance, Alexandra Tatarsky plays “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” is a demented clown show/unhinged cabaret/deranged improv, but also a fearless exploration of self-loathing that will stick with me for a very. Long. Time. TALA SAFIEFilm‘Past Lives’The closing scene of “Past Lives” is really just two people, standing on the street, waiting for a cab, in silence. But the two people have a long, intertwined history, the cab is coming to whisk one of them away and it is hard to imagine a heavier silence. The goodbye breaks Greta Lee’s character, sums up this subtle, deeply affecting film and has stayed with me all year. MATT STEVENS More

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      Jon Fosse Wants to Say the Unsayable

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      When the Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse was 7 years old, he had an accident that would shape his writing life.At home one day on his family’s small farm in Strandebarm, a village amid Norway’s western fjords, Fosse was carrying a bottle of fruit juice when he slipped on ice in the yard. As he hit the ground, the bottle smashed and a shard of glass slashed an artery in his wrist.Fosse’s parents rushed him to a doctor and, in the car, Fosse recalled recently, he had an out of body experience. “I saw myself from outside,” Fosse said in an interview. He assumed he was about to die, but he was also aware of a “kind of shimmering light,” he said.“Everything was very peaceful,” Fosse said: He felt “no sadness,” but rather a sense that there was “a beauty, a beauty to everything.”Fosse said that this childhood brush with death had influenced all his literary work: fiction, plays and poetry, for which he will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in a ceremony on Sunday.The perspective he gained in the moment of his accident, Fosse explained, made its way into his writing: “I often say that there are two languages: The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” And it’s in that “silent language,” he added, that the real meaning may lie.In a lecture in Stockholm on Thursday, a ritual that all Nobel laureates observe before getting their awards, Fosse expanded a little on the idea of a silent language. “It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,” he said. “Maybe.”To Fosse’s fans the spiritual and existential dimensions are a major part of the appeal. Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee that awarded Fosse the prize, said that Fosse’s work induced feelings and questions in readers “that ultimately exist beyond language.” The “deep sense of the inexpressible” in Fosse’s plays and novels leads readers “ever deeper into the experience of the divine,” Olsson said.Last month’s announcement that Fosse had won might have surprised some American readers. Fosse (pronounced FOSS-eh) only recently came to prominence in the English-speaking world with books that include “Septology,” a seven-part opus told in part as a stream of consciousness from the mind of an aging painter. Last year, sections of “Septology” were nominated for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. “A Shining,” a novella about a man lost in a snowy forest who is comforted by a mysterious light, was published in Britain on the day of the Nobel announcement, and in the United States afterward.Yet on continental Europe, Fosse had been a star for decades, less for his novels than for his plays, which have been compared to those of Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen and staged at some of the most prestigious playhouses.Fosse’s books on display in an Oslo bookstore. His work only gained recent recognition in the English-speaking world.Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesSarah Cameron Sunde, an artist based in the United States who has translated Fosse’s plays into English and directed several of them in New York, said that the American audience’s lack of recognition for Fosse could be explained, perhaps, by his frequently morbid subject matter: His writing often features characters wracked by loneliness, desperate for connection and contemplating the end, and many of his plays involve suicide. “Everyone is very afraid of death over here,” she said.In a two-hour interview in Oslo last week, Fosse, 64, said that as a child he didn’t intend to become a writer. His father ran the family’s small farm and managed the village store, and his mother was a homemaker. In his youth, Fosse recalled, he was more interested in rock music than in reading. He grew out his hair, which he still wears in a ponytail, and played guitar — badly, he said — with bands at school dances.But at age 14, for reasons he said he couldn’t explain, he “stopped playing, and even stopped listening to music,” and instead focused on writing poems and stories. His writing was rhythmic, filled with repetition, he said, as if he were trying to maintain a connection to his musical past. “It has been like that for 40 years,” Fosse said.His early books, including his 1983 debut, “Raudt, Svart” (in English, “Red, Black”), were “filled with pain,” Fosse said, often featuring characters trapped in moments of indecision. His second novel, “Stengd Gitar” (“Closed Guitar”), for instance, is about a woman who accidentally locks herself out of her apartment while her baby sleeps inside, then agonizes over what to do next.At the time he was writing these early books, during his 20s, Fosse was an atheist and surrounded by people who were equally irreligious. He taught at a writing academy in the city of Bergen, in Norway, where his circle included “intellectuals, students and young artists” who were committed communists and thought that art and literature should be political. (Karl Ove Knausgaard was one of his students.)But Fosse didn’t agree. “Literature ought to be engaged in itself,” he said, rather than trying to achieve a political, social or even religious goal.As he wrote more, Fosse said, the process itself led him to begin to question his atheism. He never planned a story or a poem in advance — but when the words just tumbled out, he started to wonder where it all came from. He began exploring religion, including attending Quaker meetings, and “a kind of reconciliation, or peace,” came into his writing, he said.Cecilie Seiness, Fosse’s editor for the past decade at Det Norske Samlaget, a Norwegian publisher, said that his interest in religion went beyond his own personal conviction. In the 1990s, Seiness said, Fosse briefly published a literary journal “about bringing God into writing, in opposition to the political writing of the time.” Yet Fosse’s novels and plays were never didactic, she added. “It’s not trying to convert you, absolutely not,” Seiness said. “It’s just about being open to the mysteries of life.”“I often say that there are two languages,” Fosse said. “The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesDespite his prolific output — often, a book a year — Fosse’s career only really took off in the mid-1990s when he pivoted to the theater. Soon, he was winning major awards for his stark plays, including “I Am the Wind,” whose two characters are simply called “The One” and “The Other,” and “Deathvariations,” about an estranged couple confronting their daughter’s suicide.Milo Rau, one of Europe’s most acclaimed theater directors, said that in the early 2000s, the theater world in some parts of Europe was gripped by “Fosse hype.” “The theater scene was overwhelmed by his spirituality, minimalism, seriousness, melancholy,” Rau said. Fosse’s plays “felt completely new and out of time,” he added.Fosse said he drank to cope with the demands of a globe-trotting theatrical life, and the alcohol eventually took over. At one point in 2012, he said, he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, and barely eating. He collapsed with alcohol poisoning and had to spend several weeks in a hospital.As a son drove him home from that enforced convalescence, Fosse said, he told himself, “It’s enough, Jon,” and never drank again. Soon after, he also converted to Catholicism. Attending mass, Fosse said, “can take you out of yourself somewhere, to another place.” The feeling was similar to the one he got when writing — or drinking, he added.A year after his collapse, Fosse began to be talked up as a Nobel Prize contender, though he did not become a laureate for another decade. By the time of the announcement, he had long completed “Septology,” the multipart novel, at points romantic, at others existential, in which the main character, Asle, a painter, looks back on experiences that are remarkably similar to some in Fosse’s life.At one point in the doorstop of a novel, which the Nobel committee called Fosse’s “magnum opus,” Asle recalls a childhood accident in which he slips in a farmyard and slashes an artery. In the book’s repetitive style, Asle describes the incident, in which he finds himself surrounded by a “glinting shining transparent yellow dust and he’s not scared, he feels something like happiness.”But then he stops picturing the scene. He can’t think about that moment anymore, Asle says. “It’s better to put it in my pictures as best I can.” More

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      Jane Wodening, Experimental Film Star and Intrepid Writer, Dies at 87

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      For 30 years she collaborated with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, her husband, often appearing on camera. After they divorced, she lived off the grid and wrote about her life.Jane Wodening, the longtime collaborator and wife of Stan Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker, who flourished as an author after their divorce, writing stories about her years living on the road and then alone in a mountain shack, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Denver. She was 87.The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Crystal Brakhage.Mr. Brakhage, who died in 2003, was among the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, though his work could be considered an acquired taste. He made hundreds of movies, most of them silent, that were deeply personal, sometimes elegiac and very beautiful, though they dispensed with any recognizable narrative, often veering into complete abstraction.For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he and Ms. Wodening (pronounced WOE-den-ing) lived a spartan life in a century-old cabin in a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains called Lump Gulch, sharing it with their five children and many animals, including a donkey and a pigeon named Fanny.It was this world that Mr. Brakhage captured in his idiosyncratic, inscrutable way, in what the film critic J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, described as “home movies raised to the zillionth power — silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.”Ms. Wodening was the star of many of them. He filmed her delivering their first child in a bathtub in “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), a startlingly lovely work that is considered one of his masterpieces. “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959) is a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.The work didn’t sit well with feminists, who accused Mr. Brakhage of objectifying his wife. But Ms. Wodening didn’t see herself that way.“Jane was committed to the filmmaking and the artistic enterprise,” said John Powers, who is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis and working on a biography of Mr. Brakhage. “Stan felt he was in service to the muse,” he added, in a phone interview, “and she considered herself a loyal supporter of that muse, and the muse needed help.”A lot of help. Ms. Wodening offered ideas, critiques and camera and sound assistance, along with running the day-to-day business that was “Stan Brakhage.” He signed his work “By Brakhage,” which he always said meant the two of them.Ms. Wodening with Stan Brakhage, her former husband and collaborator. Often the star of his experimental short films, she also offered critiques and camera assistance, and helped run the day-to-day business.Jason Walz/Uncommonbindery, via Granary Books, incBut Mr. Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic kitted out so that she could live in it. (The back seat was removed, among other interventions.)For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archaeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.“Driveabout,” a 2016 account of that time from Sockwood Press, one of the small presses that has published her work over the years, is charming, funny and often quite profound, like Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama, as Ms. Wodening faced perils as a single woman sleeping in truck stops, camping near sketchy characters and nursing an old friend through delirium tremens.In this and other works, she came into her own. Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin. Steve Clay, a founder of Granary Books in New York City, a small publishing house that is devoted to poetry and art books and that has put out works by Ms. Wodening, recalled his expectation that the wife of Stan Brakhage would be more “formally experimental” in her writing. “Instead, it was sort of folksy and straightforward,” he wrote in an email.To film buffs, however, Ms. Wodening remained a mythic figure — an “Enigmatic Character in Film History” as one radio program described her in a headline.“Driveabout” (2016) chronicled the years Ms. Wodening spent living out of her car and on the road after her divorce from Mr. Brakhage in 1987.via Sockwood PressShe was born Mary Jane Collom on Sept. 7, 1936, in Chicago, and grew up in Fraser, Colo., a small town in the Rockies about 70 miles northwest of Denver. Her parents, Harry and Margaret (Jack) Collom, were teachers at the local school, where Harry was also the principal.Jane was a shy child who preferred the company of animals, especially dogs. (She wrote that she spoke canine sooner than proper English.) She worked in an animal hospital and enrolled at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, thinking she would study to be a vet, before dropping out.When she met Mr. Brakhage, “we were adolescent wrecks,” she told an audience a few years ago at Los Angeles Filmforum, a showcase for experimental movies. They married in 1957; she was 21 and he was 24, and “it was quite a relief for both of us.”She recalled her first foray into his films, shortly after their marriage, when he declared: “You should take your clothes off, and we should make a film about having sex.” She balked at first — “I’m not that kind of girl!” — but he said, “I’m an artist, and an artist has to have a nude.” She thought about all the great nudes of history — from Raphael to Duchamp — and told herself, “‘I have an opportunity to join a group of people I quite admire,’ so I stripped and went to it.”For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter — living a hermit’s life for the better part of a decade.It agreed with her.When her family worried about communicating with her in an emergency, she became a ham radio operator, learning morse code to do so, and found community among other hammers, as they called themselves, who were mostly men and introverts like herself. Her call sign ended with the letters HPH, to which she gave the phonetics “Hermits Prefer Hills.”“To become a hermit and at the same time to become popular was not only paradoxical,” she wrote in “Living Up There,” her memoir of her years in the mountains, “it was a tremendous delight.”Ms. Wodening was the author of 14 books, including “Wolf Dictionary,” about how wolves communicate with one another. She had a loyal following and small but steady sales.Toward the end of her decade at Fourth of July Canyon, as her mountain home was known, she connected with another hammer, Carlos Seegmiller, a computer programmer. He lured her back to civilization (and helped her trade her typewriter for a computer). They lived together in Denver until his death in 2008.In addition to her daughter, Crystal, Ms. Wodening is survived by her daughters Myrrena Schwegmann and Neowyn Bartek; her sons, Bearthm and Rarc Brakhage; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.At her death, Ms. Wodening was working on a history of the world starting with the Big Bang. More

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      His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

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      The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Winona Ryder Fans Celebrate New Photo Book of the ‘Eternal Cool Girl’

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      Fans of Winona Ryder lined up outside Dover Street Market in Manhattan on a recent chilly evening to attend a launch party for “Winona,” a book of Polaroids and cellphone shots of the Gen X cultural idol.“She’s so famously private that any peek into her interior life is delicious,” Daniela Tijerina, a writer and editorial assistant for Vanity Fair, said. “I’ve molded so much about my own style after a woman I know so little about, and that makes her as cool as a person can possibly be.”The shots in the book were taken by Robert Rich, who started photographing Ms. Ryder soon after becoming friends with her more than 20 years ago. His images capture her in unguarded moments: eating pizza during a sleepover at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment; and smoking a cigarette in a bathroom, while the model Daria Werbowy quoted lines from “Reality Bites” to her.Robert Rich, whose candid shots fill “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesPortraits of the Gen X star from the book “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Mr. Rich, 57, signed copies of his book, as guests mobbed a merch table selling T-shirts, caps and tote bags, all of which read: “Winona.”“What we love about Winona is that you know nothing about her,” Mr. Rich said. “We love that she’s a mysterious woman. I used to never recognize her when I’d meet her. She’d always be wearing a visor or a pageboy cap. I’d walk through the city with her, and no one even knew who I was with.”He befriended Ms. Ryder when he was a manager of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street in SoHo in 1999. The shop was a hangout for Selma Blair, Sofia Coppola, Parker Posey and Kate Moss, and Mr. Rich often took Polaroids of celebrity clients in his basement office.He got to know Ms. Ryder during fittings at the store and later helped dress her in Marc Jacobs pieces for parties, premieres and magazine photo shoots. After Ms. Ryder’s shoplifting trial in 2002, he became a confidante during a period when she retreated from public view.Joe Jonas, left, looks through “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesA shot from the new book.Robert RichA year ago, Mr. Rich found himself thinking about all the Polaroids he had amassed in several shoeboxes in his closet, and he texted Ms. Ryder about the idea of collecting them in a book. After she said yes, the London-based book dealer and publisher, Idea, took on the project. Marc Jacobs wrote the foreword.As the party guests sipped champagne and flipped through the book, Mr. Jacobs made an appearance.“She was our young Garbo,” he said. “A Winona sighting was always a big deal back then. She came to one of my shows at the time, and I still remember she was a little like a deer in the headlights. She’s not snobbish. She’s not the red carpet girl. And that has always added to her cachet and cool.”Francesca Sorrenti, who designed and edited the book, reflected on Ms. Ryder’s enduring appeal.“To understand Winona, you have to understand the youth movement of the 1990s,” she said. “There are only a few personalities quite like hers out there at any given time, and in her era, it was Kate Moss and Winona. You’d just see them and you’d want to know, Who is that?”Another of Mr. Rich’s shots from “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Marc Jacobs likened Ms. Ryder to the reclusive Greta Garbo.Robert RichMs. Sorrenti said that Ms. Ryder’s shyness added to her mystique.Robert Rich“I’ve hung out with Winona,” Ms. Sorrenti added. “And yes, she’s shy, and that shyness also projected itself into what her fans consider her mystique.”Hanging out by a rack of Comme des Garçons jackets was Inna Blavatnik, a creative director. “I’m of the Generation X era that Winona represented,” she said. “It was all about having a moody cool and not giving a you-know-what, and she became my role model as a teenager.”As the night progressed, the fashion designer Zac Posen and the musician Joe Jonas stopped by — and a question loomed: Would Ms. Ryder show?“I texted her about the party,” Mr. Rich said, “but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes offered: “I’ve known Winona for a long time, and when you get to know her, she’s extremely present and generous, but she’s also good at disappearing into the ether.” She concluded: “If she were coming, she wouldn’t tell anyone she was.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes said Ms. Ryder was “good at disappearing into the ether.”Robert RichGuests at the “Winona” party.Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Ryder ultimately never materialized, but Jayna Maleri, a fashion editorial director, said she preferred it that way. “I almost never want to see Winona Ryder in person,” she said. “Not because I think she’d disappoint me, but because she occupies a place in my brain so rooted in my nostalgia that it would be jarring.”“She’s an icon of my youth, the eternal cool girl who embodied the authenticity of the ’90s,” she continued. “And I want to hold onto my illusions of her.”A Robert Rich collage.Robert Rich More