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When Andy Weir was writing his new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” he stumbled into a thorny physics problem. The book’s plot hinges on a space mold that devours the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth, and that propels itself by bashing neutrinos together. He needed to figure out how much energy would be produced […] More
A growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept: le matrimoine.PARIS — How many women had professional careers as playwrights in prerevolutionary France, between the 16th and 18th centuries? Go on, hazard a guess.The answer, according to recent scholarship, is around 150. Yet if you guessed the number was close to zero, you’re not alone. For decades, the default assumption has been that deep-seated inequality prevented women from writing professionally until the 20th century.Now a growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept along the way: le matrimoine. Matrimoine is the feminine equivalent of patrimoine — translated as patrimony, or what is inherited from male ancestors. In French, however, patrimoine is also the catchall term to describe cultural heritage. By way of matrimoine, artists and academics are pushing for the belated recognition of women’s contribution to art history, and the return of their plays to the stage.Matrimoine is no neologism. “The word was used in the Middle Ages but has been erased,” said the scholar and stage director Aurore Evain. “Patrimoine and matrimoine once coexisted, yet at the end of the day all we were left with was matrimonial agencies.”When Dr. Evain started researching prerevolutionary female authors, around 2000, she quickly realized that French academics were behind their American peers. In the early 1990s, Perry Gethner, a professor of French at Oklahoma State University, had already translated plays by Françoise Pascal, Catherine Bernard and other 17th- and 18th-century women into English, and published them.At home, on the other hand, the idea that female colleagues of Molière had been overlooked collided with entrenched narratives. The classical French repertoire revolves around a trinity of male playwrights — Molière, Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille — whose works are taught in schools and widely seen as models of national literary genius.Yet all three men crossed paths with acclaimed female peers. “Le Favori” (“The Male Favorite”), a verse tragicomedy written in 1665 by Madame de Villedieu, was performed by Molière’s own company before the king at Versailles. When Dr. Evain staged it again in 2015, over three centuries after it was last performed, the French playwright and director Carole Thibaut was struck by the similarities between “Le Favori,” which revolves around a courtier who challenges the hypocrisy of royal favor, and Molière’s “Misanthrope,” written the next year.A portrait of Madame de Villedieu (1640-1683).The British Museum“I love Molière, but there are two scenes that are basically plagiarism,” Thibaut said in a phone interview. “He borrowed heavily from ‘Le Favori.’”Before the French Revolution, most female playwrights were upper-class single women who needed to earn a living. In the 19th century, their numbers kept growing: Scholars have found at least 350 women who were paid for their writing, from the revolutionary activist Olympe de Gouges to Delphine de Girardin, both of whom had plays in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. Many of them hosted literary salons, starting with Germaine de Staël; some, like George Sand, also wrote under a pseudonym to get around gender-based prejudice.Yet not a single one of these women has a meaningful presence on the French stage today. Until the late 2000s, even feminist writers knew nothing of their work. The first volume of a French anthology of prerevolutionary female playwrights (edited by Dr. Evain, Gethner and the New York University professor Henriette Goldwyn) wasn’t released until 2007.When Thibaut, who is now at the helm of a National Dramatic Center in the city of Montluçon, first heard Dr. Evain speak at a conference two years later, the notion of matrimoine came as a revelation. “I fell apart. I started crying,” she said. “She taught me that instead of being at the dawn of a feminist awakening, we were part of a cycle, which sees women emerge and then be erased.”That historical insight coincided with a renewed focus on gender inequality in French theater, in the wake of two government audits. Until 2006, none of the five national French theaters had ever had a female director. There has been some progress since: While only 7 percent of national and regional dramatic centers, the next tier of public institutions, were led by women in 2006, the proportion was 27 percent in 2019. Still, in March, an open letter published in the French newspaper Libération complained about the lack of women being appointed to top theater jobs since the start of the pandemic.From 2009 onward, Thibaut, Dr. Evain and other activists joined forces through an association, known as HF, to push for change, and matrimoine became one of their rallying calls. In 2013, Dr. Evain launched the annual “Days of the Matrimoine,” a festival that runs alongside the “Days of the Patrimoine,” a national celebration of France’s cultural heritage.That visibility is now affecting younger generations of scholars and artists, like Julie Rossello Rochet, a playwright who completed a doctoral dissertation last year on her 19th-century predecessors. In a phone interview, she said that studying their work had helped her process the unease she felt as a young writer: “I kept hearing, ‘Oh, it’s so rare, a woman who writes for the stage.’ Actually, it isn’t.”A performance of Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”) directed by Aurore Evain. The play had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française.Carmen MariscalThe scholars interviewed agreed that women’s plays offer a different perspective from that of male playwrights — a female gaze, so to speak, shaped by the authors’ life experiences. “They promoted women’s intelligence,” Dr. Rossello Rochet said.“They created strong female characters, who choose politics over love, as well as male characters who choose love,” said Dr. Evain, who also pointed to the attention they paid to the role of fathers.The two prerevolutionary plays Dr. Evain has directed since 2015 speak to that originality. In addition to “Le Favori,” she brought back Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”), a comedy that had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française. The plot cleverly toys with gendered expectations: In it, an older woman endeavors to marry a younger man, who is himself a woman in disguise. “It’s an early queer play, in which everything is upside down,” Dr. Evain said. “Order is never restored: The leading lady is in drag until the end.”While a handful of smaller theaters, like the Ferme de Bel Ebat in Guyancourt, have welcomed productions like “La Folle Enchère,” persuading programmers to invest in the matrimoine remains a challenge. The Comédie-Française, where multiple women have presented their work over the centuries, has yet to revive a single one of these plays.In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in 2017, the troupe’s director, Eric Ruf, said he was “working on it,” but added that it would be hard to sell main-stage tickets for a “little-known” playwright. (A spokeswoman for the Comédie-Française declined to say whether there were plans to bring back plays by women in future seasons.)Yet feminists believe that unless these early women’s plays are performed and taught, history may yet repeat itself. “If we ignore our matrimoine, if we don’t change the way we think about our culture, the women who came after us may not leave a legacy, either,” Thibaut said.In the eyes of Dr. Rossello Rochet, the benefits are obvious for young playwrights. “Having a history has given me deeper roots,” she said. “It has made me feel stronger.” More
It was over lunch in 2013 that the literary agent Eric Simonoff asked Jonathan Ames, “So what do you want to do with your writing career?”Ames replied, “Have you read Richard Stark?”Simonoff confessed that he had not. Moreover, he had no idea who Richard Stark was.“Well,” Ames explained to his old friend and new agent, “I’d like to be like Richard Stark.”Richard Stark is one of the pseudonyms for the prolific writer Donald Westlake who, under that name, published over 20 novels centered on a character named Parker. The Parker series, with titles like “The Hunter,” “Butcher’s Moon” and “Nobody Runs Forever,” features a classic antihero: a no-nonsense criminal who speaks tersely and acts decisively, most often with his fists.Ames, in his 20-year writing career, had written perhaps most frequently about a character named “Jonathan Ames.” Before he departed New York for a television job in Los Angeles in 2014, he was well known in his hometown as an essayist, novelist, performer and bon vivant. “Jonathan Ames” turned up as the lead in his comedic confessional essays, collected in books like “What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer,” and in the short story “Bored to Death,” which in 2009 became an HBO comedy series starring Jason Schwartzman. On that show, Schwartzman is a neurotic Brooklyn writer who dreams of writing pulp novels and who, inspired by his love of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, decides to advertise his services as an amateur private detective.“We were shooting the first season and we were coming up with the graphics for the opening, which showed a pulp novel called ‘Bored to Death’ opening up and showing the actual words of my story,” Ames, 57, said this month over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. I wish I was writing books with covers like that.’ And one of the writers said to me, ‘Jonathan, you have a TV show now.’”The implication, of course, being that whatever rung on the literary ladder that involves writing pulp fiction, Ames, a newly minted HBO showrunner, had long since climbed past it. “But he picked up on something,” said Ames. “The fact that, even then, my Holy Grail was to be writing crime novels.”This month, Ames has captured his personal Holy Grail, in the form of a detective novel titled “A Man Named Doll.” Published by Mulholland Books, it is the first in a proposed series (there’s already a Netflix film in the works) about a Los Angeles-based ex-cop and private detective named Happy Doll. (No spoilers, but suffice to say that the circumstances leading to his unusual first name are not, themselves, happy.)“A Man Named Doll” comes out on April 20.Crime readers may notice some superficial similarities between Doll and the kind of fabled gumshoes that Ames has long been enamored with — figures like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, or quick-fisted pulp avatars like Parker or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. But it quickly becomes clear that Happy owes more to the rumpled Marlowe played by Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” than to any hard-boiled toughs inhabited by Humphrey Bogart.Doll, for example, may be the first private detective in Los Angeles who’s in Freudian analysis five days a week. He is certainly the first one to describe his relationship with his beloved dog as “disturbed,” saying, “We’re like two old-fashioned closeted bachelors who cohabitate and don’t think the rest of the world knows we’re lovers.” Doll is less Jack Reacher than, well, Jonathan Ames.“He’s a neurotic Reacher with the soul of a poet,” said Joshua Kendall, the editorial director of Mulholland. When he received “A Man Named Doll,” he said, he recognized it as perfect for Mulholland, an imprint that specializes in both contemporary and classic genre fiction. But he also realized that “one of the great pleasures of the book is seeing the Ames pop out.”Of Ames’s detour toward crime writing, Simonoff, his literary agent, said, “He was clearly called in this direction. But the novel also exhibits the charm and quirkiness of classic Jonathan Ames. There’s a sweetness to it that isn’t there in the typical Parker novel.” (Since their lunch, Simonoff has happily brushed up on his Westlake.)Ames has spent most of his decades-long literary career bed-hopping promiscuously between forms and mediums: He’s been genre-fluid but pulp-curious.“Bored to Death” was a warmly satirical take on hard-boiled themes, set against a hipster Brooklyn backdrop. And on assignment from the online publication Byliner, Ames wrote a novella-length story, “You Were Never Really Here,” which was adapted into a dark and violent film directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix that premiered at Cannes in 2017. With that story, Ames said, “I did have this goal of not being funny at all. I just wanted to write something really lean and dark.” He loved the challenge of creating “an express train of a plot, where you can’t put it down.”There is a well-worn piece of writing advice, often traced to Aristotle, that contends that the perfect ending of any story should be surprising yet inevitable, and the fact that Ames has written a detective novel seems exactly that: surprising yet inevitable.“At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” Ames said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”Adam Amengual for The New York TimesOther authors have veered unexpectedly into crime writing, either as a commercial diversion or out of love for the form. Graham Greene famously classified certain of his novels as “entertainments.” (Ames said, “I often liked the entertainments best of all.”) Denis Johnson wrote the pulp homage “Nobody Move,” and the Booker Prize winner John Banville wrote crime fiction as Benjamin Black.Yet for Ames, “A Man Named Doll” is not a dalliance with detective fiction so much as the consummation of a decades-long courtship. “At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” he said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”“A Man Named Doll” feels both like the culmination of that apprenticeship and the logical successor to his comedic autobiographical writing, in which, after all, he cast himself as a lone figure roaming in the naked city, a broken romantic embroiled in adventures that often veered toward the illicit.Ames’s former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, once gave a quote to The Paris Review that has stuck with him. Oates, he recalled, had said that, in “Ulysses,” James Joyce had used the structure of the “Odyssey” as “his bridge to get his soldiers across.”For him, pulp has become that bridge, he said.“The soldiers being my wish as a writer to observe, to describe, to form sentences, to entertain and to share my fears, my hopes, my, you know, despair — and maybe some of my courage. It’s important,” Ames added, “to try and pass on courage to the reader.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More
Michelle Zauner, a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, is making her book debut with “Crying in H Mart.”After an hour of discussing her mother, the afterlife and the shamelessness sometimes required in producing art, Michelle Zauner adjusted her video camera to show her Bushwick apartment. Her coffee table, suddenly in view, was covered with Jolly Pong Cereal Snack, NongShim Shrimp Crackers, Lotte Malang Cow Milk Candies and other Asian junk food.“This whole time we’ve been talking,” she said, “you’ve been in front of these snacks.”These are her favorite selections from H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that for her serves as both muse and refuge. Zauner, best known for her music project Japanese Breakfast, wrote about the “beautiful, holy place” and the death of her mother, Chongmi, in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, “Crying in H Mart,” which led to a memoir by the same name that Knopf is publishing on Tuesday.In the essay, which is the first chapter of her book, she relayed her grief, her appetite and her fear that, after losing Chongmi to cancer in 2014, “am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” The rest of the memoir explores her identity as a biracial Asian-American, the bonds that food can forge and her efforts to understand and remember her mother.Zauner at home in Brooklyn with a painting by her mother.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesZauner’s parents met in Seoul in the early 1980s, when her father, Joel, moved there from the United States to sell cars to the American and Canadian military. Chongmi was working at the hotel where he stayed. They married after three months of dating and traveled through Japan, Germany and South Korea again before landing in Eugene, Ore., where Michelle Zauner grew up. In early drafts of the book, she said during our interview, she tried to imagine what it was like for her mother to marry so quickly, to face a language barrier with her husband, to uproot herself over and over. When she asked her father questions like “Do you remember how she was feeling?,” he answered with geographical facts and figures.As with many immigration stories, scarcity threaded its way through a lot of what Zauner found while writing the book: In their family, her father was so focused on providing that he couldn’t give her the emotional support she sought, while her mother viewed identity crises almost as a waste of energy. “I feel like she’d be moved by parts of the book,” Zauner said, “but I think there are parts she’d think, ‘I don’t know why you had to go on about this for the whole book when you’re just like an American kid.’”Zauner, 32, writes about their volatile relationship, contrasting her mother’s poised restraint with her need to express herself, her sense of urgency that “no one could possibly understand what I went through and I needed everyone to know.”After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she threw herself into the Philadelphia rock band Little Big League in 2011 before striking out on her own as Japanese Breakfast. Her first two solo albums, like her memoir, focused on grief: “Psychopomp,” in 2016, and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” in 2017. Her next one, “Jubilee,” is scheduled for release in June, and it is more joyful, influenced by Kate Bush, Björk and Randy Newman. In between these projects, she worked on video game soundtracks, directed music videos and crashed into the literary world, reflecting her maximalist and, yes, shameless approach to creativity.“The thing about Michelle is you just need to give her a little push in that direction — an affirmation — and suddenly she’s just flying,” said Daniel Torday, a novelist and the director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr, who has been a mentor to Zauner.For her the artistic process, whether it is in her music or her writing, often feels all-consuming and anxiety-producing, something she handles by working through it. “If I’m going to take the time to go in on something,” Zauner said, “I want to be terrified of it.”And there are terrifying parts she confronts when retracing the last few months of her mother’s life. It is not exactly the cancer — in the book, she describes the disease with polish, crushing Vicodin for her mother with a spoon and scattering its blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream “like narcotic sprinkles.” It is that Chongmi was dying just as their relationship was at its best, “a sort of renaissance period, where we were really getting to enjoy each other’s company and know each other as adults,” Zauner said.In 2014, she moved back home to help care for her. Chongmi died that October, two weeks after Michelle Zauner married Peter Bradley, a fellow musician. By Christmas, he joined her and her father in Eugene, navigating the first heavy moment of their new life together — “like a baptism of adulthood,” Bradley said.“Crying in H Mart” is out on April 20.She and her father haven’t been in contact for more than a year, save for an attempt at therapy over Zoom. After her mother died, “our grief couldn’t come together in this way where we could experience it together,” Zauner said. “He started wearing this big ruby in his ear and then got a big tattoo, lost 40 pounds, started dating this young woman, and it felt like kind of a second death.”In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar published earlier this month, she wrote about the pain of that experience, then searching for a way to make peace with him and his new relationship, which has since ended.Joel Zauner, in a phone interview, expressed sadness about their estrangement. He avoided reading “Crying in H Mart” for months (Michelle Zauner sent him an advance copy), but when he did, he wept throughout and was stung that he wasn’t included in the acknowledgments. The tattoo was done on the anniversary of Chongmi’s death, he said, and is of her name in Korean, with the Korean word for “sweetheart” underneath.“I’m not a perfect guy,” he said. “But I certainly deserve more than I was given in both the article and the book.”Today, Zauner feels ready to shake this period of loss and just tour, and there is still more she wants to unpack about being Korean, possibly by living there for a year. “I think there’s a big part of my sense of belonging that is missing because I don’t speak the language fluently,” she said, and she is determined to preserve the thread she has to the Korean side of her family.She became engrossed at one point with Emily Kim, who as Maangchi is known as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child,” finding peace in the way she peeled Korean pears — “the Korean way,” Kim wrote in an email — using the knife to remove the skin in one long strip, the way Chongmi used to. In 2019, the two starred in a Vice video that explored the effects of migration on cuisine, and on Zauner’s 30th birthday, Kim made her dinner. “She’s a real Korean daughter,” Kim said.Zauner feels wary, however, about her work in any conjunction with the anti-Asian attacks in the past year. “I’m fearful of using this tragedy to try and promote anything I’ve created,” she said over email the day after the Atlanta shootings. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate my feelings on such a heavy thing with a few words.”Her belief system these days has become more nuanced than before. She is an atheist, “but then there has to be some smudging of the edges for me,” she said. “In some ways it is impossible for me to not feel like my mother was looking out for me because of the serendipitous, fateful way that things happened in my life.”Almost a year ago, when she finished writing “Crying in H Mart,” she posted a photo of herself in her living room with her eyes closed and a peaceful smile, holding the book’s draft in her hands, with the caption “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”There are instances when even though it goes against everything you believe, it’s important, Zauner said, to create an ambiguous space for things.“Like when I leave flowers on her grave, I know technically what I am doing is I’m leaving the flowers for myself. I’m creating a ritual and commemorating her with my time by doing this. But that is not enough for me to feel OK about it,” she said. “I need to kind of believe that she knows that they’re there.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More
The creators of “Zero,” including the co-writer Antonio Dikele Distefano, say they hope viewers enjoy it so much that the characters’ racial identity becomes irrelevant.ROME — While much of the world spent 2020 in lockdowns of varying severity, the 28-year-old Italian author Antonio Dikele Distefano had the busiest year of his life.Along with working on his sixth novel and interviewing Italians of different ethno-cultural backgrounds for a television program, he spent months on the set of “Zero,” a show inspired by one of his novels that premieres on Netflix on April 21.This is Dikele Distefano’s first time co-writing a television show. Until now, he has been best known for his books, gritty coming-of-age fiction, with classic themes of heartbreak, friendship and uncertainty about the future, which have become a publishing sensation in Italy. But the work of Dikele Distefano, whose parents migrated from Angola, also integrates his experiences of being a Black Italian.And “Zero,” which refers to the nickname of the lead character, is the first Italian television series to feature a predominantly Black cast.Center from left, Giuseppe Dave Seke, Daniela Scattolin and Dylan Magon shooting an episode of “Zero.”Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixVirginia Diop and Dave Seke, who plays Omar, the lead character in the show.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixDikele Distefano says he hopes that fact will only briefly be a talking point. He likes to cite “Coming to America,” the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy that made more than $288 million at the box office worldwide, as an inspiration. “The film is so entertaining that you don’t even think about” the fact that the cast is all Black, he said of that movie in a Zoom interview this week. “For me, that is a victory.”In his novels, Dikele Distefano takes a similar tack, throwing light on the lives of young people, the children of immigrants, who are not considered citizens even when they are born in Italy, speak the language and share the same cultural references. They can apply for Italian citizenship only when they turn 18.The desire to change society motivates much of his work, he said, including “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’” So far, growing calls to change the law and grant citizenship to anyone born in Italy have not gotten far in Parliament.Dikele Distefano’s raw and emotionally open approach to his writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels. While his books are shaped by his background, they home in on universal emotional truths.“People often say that we need beautiful stories,” he said. “I’ve always been drawn to real stories. Truth appeals to me.”He added, “I wouldn’t be able to tell a story far from me, something that I haven’t lived or that doesn’t belong to me.”Dikele Distefano in the Barona district on the outskirts of Milan, where “Zero” was largely filmed. His raw and emotionally open approach to writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt was Dikele Distefano’s “authentic voice” and “clear language” that caught the attention of Netflix, said Ilaria Castiglioni, the streaming service’s manager for Italian original series. She said that he was the first to bring to Netflix Italy the experiences of second-generation immigrants in Italy and that “we were drawn to how he narrated his experience so naturally.”“Zero” is the sixth made-in-Italy series for Netflix, after the crime drama “Suburra: Blood on Rome,” now in its third season; the teenage drama “Baby,” also in its third season; the historical fantasy “Luna Nera”; the supernatural drama “Curon,” and “Summertime,” whose protagonist is a woman of Italian and Nigerian descent.Castiglioni said Netflix had seen a need to better represent Italy’s changing society. “A very important theme for us is representation, to create empathy, so that as many people as possible find themselves reflected in what they see onscreen,” she said.But “Zero” is not overtly about the struggles and discriminations faced by Black Italians, she added.“We tried to tell a story that was universal,” while recognizing the greater difficulties that Black Italians have to deal with, she said. “Our objective is to create entertainment,” she added, “and if that entertainment creates a debate, it’s a plus, but we leave that aspect to our public.”“Zero” explores the metaphorical invisibility felt by many young people facing an uncertain future. In the figure of the main character, Omar (Giuseppe Dave Seke) an often-ignored pizza delivery guy, the metaphor is made literal: He can actually will himself to become invisible. Attempting to save his neighborhood from greedy property investors, the mild-mannered Omar becomes a community superhero, joining a group of other young people who have their own useful skill sets.Characters in the show, such as Sara (played by Scattolin) and Momo (Magon), have their own useful skill sets.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixOmar (Dave Seke) can will himself to become invisible and becomes a community superhero.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixAngelica Pesarini, a professor at NYU Florence who focuses on issues of race, gender, identity and citizenship in Italy, said, “The fact that the main character is a dark-skinned Black man — already I think it’s revolutionary in the Italian landscape.”Though racism is rife in their country, Italians are loath to admit it to themselves, Pesarini said.“Netflix is doing a series with an almost entirely Black cast and then on the national channels you have horrific instances of racism that wouldn’t be imaginable in the United States,” she noted.Among recent examples, an Italian actress used a racist slur during an interview on the national broadcaster in March. A few days later, a satirical program on the private broadcaster Mediaset aired an old parody of a lawmaker that also used the slur. In another skit, which aired this month, the same program was again accused of racism after the hosts made fun of Chinese people. On Wednesday, one of the hosts posted a video to apologize for that episode.Pesarini, the NYU Florence professor, said, “I was thinking of all the Black Italian kids watching these programs,” and “hearing the N-word referred to them.”“It was so violent for me as an adult, I can’t imagine the damage this does for someone growing up in this country as a nonwhite Italian,” added Pesarini, who is of Italian and East African heritage.Pesarini and other activists have started a campaign, #cambieRAI (a play on the national broadcaster’s name that translates as “you will change”). She said that they had sent a letter to RAI “explaining why we were shocked and fed up and frustrated” with how Black people were represented on television in Italy. So far, there has been no response, she added.The coronavirus set the production of “Zero” back an entire year. When Italy went into national lockdown in March 2020, the cast and Dikele Distefano decided to remain ensconced in a hotel in Rome, giving them an unexpected opportunity to bond, a chemistry that is manifest in the actors’ onscreen interactions.Dikele Distefano said he was motivated in part by “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’”Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“We became best friends, we still speak every day,” Dikele Distefano said. That said, the tension of working within the restraints imposed by the pandemic is something he hopes never to repeat. “I would like to work in a more relaxed way,” he said, laughing.“Zero” has a carefully selected soundtrack. Dikele Distefano’s first forays into writing came via his passion for music, he said, and in his teens, he rapped under the name “Nashy.” In 2016, he founded Esse Magazine, a digital publication about Italian music and urban culture. “Rap was a school for me, the possibility to express what I was feeling in four-four time,” he said. When he discovered books, he gave up rap, he added, but without the music, “I wouldn’t be writing.”Dikele Distefano worked on the script for “Zero” alongside the writers Carolina Cavalli, Lisandro Monaco, Massimo Vavassori and Stefano Voltaggio. The eight initial episodes end in a cliffhanger that seems to beg for a second season.But Castiglioni said that Netflix had made no decision about any continuation. “For now, we’re concentrated on this series,” she said. “Let’s see how it goes and then look to the future.” More
The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: “Get up!”It is the opening scene — and the injunction — of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” her friend James Baldwin would later recall. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry — at 29 — became the youngest American and the first Black recipient.How often the word “first” appears in the life of Hansberry; how often it will appear in this review. See also “spokeswoman” or “only.” Strange words of praise; meretricious even, in how they can mask the isolation they impose. Hansberry seemed to anticipate it all. At the triumphant premiere of “Raisin,” at the standing ovation and the calls for playwright to take the stage, she initially refused to leave her seat. “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all,” she later wrote, “is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”Hansberry died in 1965, at 34, of cancer. The fact still feels intolerable, almost unassimilable — her death not merely tragedy but a kind of theft. “Look at the work that awaits you!” she said in a speech to young writers, calling them “young, gifted and Black” — inspiring the Nina Simone song of the same name. Look at the work that awaited her. She goaded herself on, even in the hospital: “Comfort has come to be its own corruption.”But a flurry of recent renewed interest attests to how much Hansberry did accomplish — the range of her interests and seriousness of her political commitments. There has been Imani Perry’s 2018 book “Looking for Lorraine” and Tracy Heather Strain’s 2017 documentary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.” The pre-eminent Hansberry scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson has a book in the works.To this Soyica Diggs Colbert, a professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University, adds her contribution with “Radical Vision,” positioned as the first scholarly biography. Here is Hansberry resurrected from the archives, from her scripts, scraps and drafts. Through a series of close readings, Colbert examines “how her writing, published and unpublished, offers a road map to negotiate Black suffering in the past and present.”.To quote Simone de Beauvoir, an important influence, Hansberry could not think in terms of joy or despair “but in terms of freedom.” And she could not think of freedom as a destination but as a practice, full of intervals, regressions. It is the same idea one encounters in radical thinkers today, in Mariame Kaba’s notion of abolitionist feminism as a practice of freedom.A central aim of Colbert’s biography, as with Perry’s book and Strain’s documentary, is to reclaim Hansberry as the radical she was.In the public eye, she was the slim and pleasing housewife, the accidental playwright featured in a photo spread in Vogue. “Best Play Prize Won By a Negro Girl, 28,” The New York Herald Tribune declared. “Mrs. Robert Nemiroff,” The New York Times profiled her, “voluble, energetic, pretty and small.”Studies of Hansberry excavate her behind-the-scenes activism. There is the now famous story of her confrontation with Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general in 1963 convened a group of Black activists and intellectuals. Hansberry demanded Kennedy acknowledge racism as a moral problem, not a purely social one, before walking out in disgust.Colbert adds detail and dimension to Hansberry’s work — covering, for instance, the years she spent writing for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, reporting on the Mau Mau Uprising and child labor in South Africa. She held fund-raisers, and studied alongside Alice Childress and W.E.B. Du Bois. The mythos of “the first” obscures so much of the communality of Hansberry’s thinking. “We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together,” Nina Simone wrote of Hansberry in her memoir. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.”A small interlude. Imagine another opening scene. Another dim, drab room. The alarm sounds. A woman wakes, tries to rouse a sleeping child. This is the beginning of another story set on Chicago’s South Side — Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” published in 1940. The parallels to me have always felt too uncanny for it not to be homage. Hansberry reviewed Wright’s fiction — a little uncharitably, to my mind. She had no patience for despair, for victims, really; her plays hinge on a decisive moment in which a character fends off complacency and takes a stand (quite often while making a thunderous speech about the necessity of taking a stand). There’s an odd narrowness to her vision. Her commitment to realism was absolute, a matter of moral principle. Interest in anomie, absurdity or paralysis was dismissed as liberal silliness, and an abdication of artistic responsibility.This stringency is curious, given Hansberry’s openness when it came to tactics, her insistence that the movement required a multipronged approach. “Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and nonviolent,” she wrote. “The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.” This belief, Colbert argues, was her inheritance.Soyica Diggs Colbert, the author of “Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.”Paul B. Jones/Georgetown UniversityHansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in the first Black-owned and -operated hospital in the nation. She was a “movement baby,” Colbert writes. Her father built a real estate empire by chopping up larger apartments into smaller units to provide housing for the waves of Black migrants who fled the South only to encounter deeply segregated Chicago.In 1937, the family moved to a white neighborhood — the story she revisits in “Raisin.” A segregationist landowners’ association challenged the sale of the house. White mobs harassed the family, on one occasion throwing a concrete mortar through the window. It narrowly missed Hansberry, who was 7 years old.These years taught Hansberry the necessity of fighting on all fronts. Her father filed a lawsuit, and Hansberry recalled her “desperate and courageous mother,” home without him, “patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children.”Colbert’s study is loving, lavishly detailed, repetitive and a little stilted in the telling. (The notes, however, are splendid — fluent, rich and full of a feeling of discovery; here she permits herself to speak more freely.) The book circles a few points very dutifully — even as we feel Colbert itching to rove. She has a habit of making arresting asides and then refusing to follow their trail: “Hansberry’s writing suggests that she understood Blackness to implicitly include what we would now describe as queerness.”It’s not incidental, I think, that these asides often have to do with desire. Colbert pays forensic attention here to scripts, articles and stories, but takes less intellectual interest in the jottings and journals — to the self that was feverish, exultant, wary in its sexuality. The thinking gets pleasantly tousled and unsure here; Hansberry is off the podium and on her second glass of Scotch, wondering at her attraction to femininity — “the rather disgusting symbol of woman’s oppression.” And yet: “I am fond of being able to watch calves and ankles freely.” She divorced her husband in 1964 (they remained artistic collaborators) and began to move in lesbian circles that included Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh, the author of “Harriet the Spy.” For years, she kept annual inventories of her loves and hates. (“My homosexuality” made both at age 29.) To read these notes, their shame and their thrill (At 32, under “I like”: “the inside of a lovely woman’s mouth”) recalls some of the pleasures of the private writing of Virginia Woolf and the fragmented diaries of Susan Sontag — two other writers capable of caginess about their attraction to women.Hansberry exhorted students to “write about our people, tell their story. Leave the convoluted sex preoccupations to the convoluted.” And yet out of her own convolutions, a new self was emerging, a new understanding. “I feel I am learning how to think all over again,” she wrote anonymously to a lesbian magazine.What would this thinking have wrought? Her impatience, her greed for work, for thought — for more life — is palpable until the end. The final journal entries burn. She is desperate for her lover (“I consumed her whole”) stuck in the hospital, she is hungry to return to her play. “The writing urge is on,” she wrote. “Only death or infirmity can stop me now.” More
“The Seven Deadly Sins,” a theatrical anthology series, will start off on June 23 at a series of storefront windows in the Meatpacking District.After enjoying a successful run in Miami Beach from late November through January, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an outdoor theatrical anthology series that explores humanity’s basest impulses, will come to New York. Performances are scheduled to begin on June 23 and will take place in storefront windows in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.“I think it was important for us to do it in this moment of transition,” said Moisés Kaufman, the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, which is producing the show with Madison Wells Live in association with Miami New Drama. “We wanted to be able to create something while the pandemic is still with us because it feels more like an act of defiance.”The New York version of “The Seven Deadly Sins” will feature short new plays by Ngozi Anyanwu, Thomas Bradshaw, MJ Kaufman, Jeffrey LaHoste, Ming Peiffer and Bess Wohl. Moisés Kaufman will also contribute a piece to the anthology and direct the production. Each playwright’s work will address a particular “sin”: pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth or lust.“We really wanted the event to not be a revival of an existing play,” Kaufman said in an interview on Wednesday. After having been through a pandemic, “the idea that new art can be born on the streets of Manhattan is something that excites us.”The 10-minute-long plays will be viewable from the street — by a masked, socially distanced audience, who will be provided with disposable earbuds to hear the actors in the storefronts. Escorted by a guide, they will watch the seven pieces in different orders. Before viewing the artistically rendered debauchery, ticket holders will have the opportunity to grab a drink at a pop-up bar called Purgatory.The Meatpacking District Business Improvement District is pitching in to identify performance venues and manage the production’s use of public space.Dael Orlandersmith and Nilo Cruz were among the writers who contributed plays to the twice-extended inaugural production, which was conceived of by Michel Hausmann, a co-founder of Miami New Drama with Moisés Kaufman.Storefront performances have cropped up in New York periodically since the pandemic began, but none so far have matched the scale or complexity of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” In March, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that live indoor and outdoor shows could resume in the state at limited capacity beginning April 2, paving the way for more ambitious projects to take root in the city this spring and summer.Tickets go on sale May 14. Casting information will be released soon. More
After the author and TV personality’s death, his longtime assistant was left to finish his last book, a world travel guide.In March 2017, Anthony Bourdain had an idea for a book, but no time to write it. Since he started traveling and eating on camera with the Food Network’s “A Cook’s Tour” in 2000, the chef, frequent dropper of f-bombs and insatiable eater of delicious things had spent the majority of his time in the field, most recently for his CNN show “Parts Unknown.” Mr. Bourdain and his team decided he would carve out some time to write in the summer of 2018, when he would have a few rare continuous weeks at home during a break in filming. That, of course, never happened, as Mr. Bourdain died by suicide in June 2018.Nevertheless, next week, almost three years after his death, and after a pandemic that almost completely shut down international travel, Ecco will publish “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide” by Mr. Bourdain and his longtime assistant (or “lieutenant” as he often referred to her), Laurie Woolever.“To me, there was no question that the book would go on,” Ms. Woolever said in a recent video call from her home in Queens. “As long as I had the blessing of his estate, which I did, I wanted to finish it as a way to serve his legacy.”“World Travel” is built out of a somewhat amorphous vision, an “atlas of the world as seen through his eyes,” as Ms. Woolever writes in the book’s introduction. It is the second book, after 2016’s “Appetites,” that includes Ms. Woolever’s name on the cover just under Mr. Bourdain’s, albeit smaller. It speaks to the power of Mr. Bourdain’s legacy and the singularity of his point of view that his name still sits so boldly on the book’s cover despite the fact that he contributed not a single new written word to its 469 pages.Laurie Woolever outside Gray’s Papaya on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which makes an appearance in “World Travel.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe book is built to read like a travel guide, even if it would be a stretch to use it as one. It covers 43 countries, with Mr. Bourdain’s recommendations for restaurants, hotels and other attractions in each one drawn mostly from his various TV shows. In between, Ms. Woolever, who was archivist, fact checker and editor on the book, as well as its co-author, has inserted context and, for each destination, a section on airports, public transportation and taxi costs. Occasionally she adds in her own recommendations based on her travels and knowledge of Mr. Bourdain’s favorite off-camera spots: one particularly charming section includes a delivery request that Mr. Bourdain emailed to Ms. Woolever, for Pastrami Queen, a kosher deli on New York’s Upper East Side.The book comes at a pivotal moment in travel, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that Americans who are vaccinated can travel internationally, and as closed borders between countries are slowly and fitfully reopening. The timing is fortuitous, though not intentional: The book was originally scheduled to publish in the fall of 2020 and Ms. Woolever said the publication was delayed because of production issues, not the coronavirus.Edward Ash-Milby, the lifestyle book buyer at Barnes & Noble, said in an email that the bookstore chain has put in an order similar in size to that for past best sellers by Mr. Bourdain: “We’ve ordered it for all 600-plus stores and we are all very excited about it.”After the travel book market took a major hit over the past year, Mr. Ash-Milby said in his email that he has started to see it coming back in the United States, especially when it comes to domestic travel. “World Travel,” he said, was perfectly positioned to take advantage of American readers’ pent-up wanderlust for places further afield. “I love the publication date of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘World Travel,’” he wrote. “It feels perfectly timed to meet the imagination of today’s travelers who are primed to explore.”Mr. Bourdain never professed to being a fan of travel guides and, before this book, he had never really expressed much interest in writing one. In an interview during South by Southwest in 2016, he admitted that he rarely read them: “I like atmospherics,” he said. “I don’t want a list of the best hotels or restaurants; I want to read fiction set in the place where you get a real sense of what that place is like.”Despite this, Ms. Woolever said there was also an understanding between the two of them that a guide could be exactly what his fans wanted. “I would like to think that even if someone has seen every episode, even if they’ve read every book, there is the possibility of fresh discovery with this book,” she said.The choice of what to include — which Singaporean hawker stalls, Spanish tapas restaurants or American dive bars made the list — mostly came out of one hourlong, recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Ms. Woolever and Mr. Bourdain held at Mr. Bourdain’s Manhattan high-rise apartment, which he had, according to Ms. Woolever, decorated to mimic one of his favorite hotels, Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont.“I prepared ahead of time for this meeting with Tony by making a list of every place he had been,” Ms. Woolever said. Then, as Mr. Bourdain chain-smoked and free-associated, she took notes. “He would just, off the top of his head, say ‘We’ve got to include this market stall, and this place with the chicken,’” she recalled. “He had a pretty astonishing level of recall for somebody who had done so much.”“World Travel” contains essays by Mr. Bourdain’s friends, colleagues and family, but no new contributions from him.EccoIn that quiet summer of 2018, Mr. Bourdain was planning to go through the curated list of countries and cities and write new, original essays about them. From his work on television it isn’t hard to imagine what they could have been: an effusive, profanity-laced ode to the decadent and delicate noodle soups of Vietnam perhaps, or an examination of why he loved old colonial hotels in the tropics so much despite their often problematic histories.The conversation, meant to be the first of many brainstorming sessions, became Ms. Woolever’s only blueprint. Facing all of the unwritten essays, she reached out to Mr. Bourdain’s friends, family members and former colleagues to fill that space: His younger brother, Christopher Bourdain, writes about traveling to the Jersey Shore and Uruguay for episodes of “Parts Unknown” and “No Reservations”; the record producer Steve Albini provides a lengthy list of his favorite where-would-Bourdain-eat spots in Chicago; the Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg recounts how the stunt that made her restaurant famous (a “bone luge” shot, in which bourbon is poured down a hollowed out veal bone) was concocted for an episode of “The Layover,” the relatively short-lived Travel Channel show that was, before this book, the closest Mr. Bourdain ever came to making a “how to” guide.“It’s a hard and lonely thing to co-author a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling that world,” Ms. Woolever admits in the book’s introduction.Ms. Woolever first worked with Mr. Bourdain in 2002, when her former employer, the chef Mario Batali, recommended her as a recipe tester and editor for “Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.” She became his assistant in 2009 after working as, among other things, an editor and a private chef. As Ms. Woolever recounts it, Mr. Bourdain happened to be looking for an assistant at the precise time that she had a child and was looking to do something new. “It was such a lucky coincidence of timing for both of us,” she said.Ms. Woolever knew Mr. Bourdain well after so many years, and it was that closeness that helped her get through some of the hard decisions in putting together the book, she said.Much of that decision-making process involved talking to others: members of his close circle of confidantes, his production team and past fixers who offered updated information on old spots Mr. Bourdain might have visited. “I never want to speak for Tony, but if I had to speculate — and I think we all agreed — I think he would want these things that had been set in motion to go on,” she said. She ran decade-old “No Reservations” picks by past collaborators to make sure they were still good. She pored over transcripts of past shows and spent days contacting chefs in the French countryside or along the Mozambique coast to make sure they were still operating.Anthony Bourdain filming “Parts Unknown” in Butte, Mont., in 2015. CNNThat fact-checking process took on a new level of intensity, of course, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as restaurants globally were hit hard. “I did check to see that all the listed venues were still open just before the window closed to any new edits,” she told me. She knows of just one establishment — Cold Tea bar in Toronto — that has closed since, but doesn’t regret its inclusion in the book. “I am happy to have its listing remain in the text, because Tony loved it, and I hope that the business owners may be able to resurrect it in the future,” she said.Over the course of the book, Ms. Woolever never makes the claim that the guide is comprehensive — and the end result does feel incomplete and unbalanced. The countries of Ghana, Ireland and Lebanon get three pages apiece; the United States gets nearly 100. There is a chapter on Macau, but nothing on Indonesia or Thailand. These are somewhat predictable shortcomings, dependent as the book is on voice-over transcripts spanning decades and the impossible task of stringing them together across time.Some of the inclusions feel at odds with Mr. Bourdain’s avoid-the-tourists approach to travel, as well. In the Tokyo section, recommendations include the Park Hyatt hotel (made famous by “Lost in Translation,”); Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant at the center of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”; the bizarre kitsch-fest that is the Robot Restaurant; and a bar in the tourist-clogged Golden Gai neighborhood. These may be all appealing attractions to a first-timer in Tokyo, but there is nothing in that selection that you wouldn’t find at the top of an algorithm-generated TripAdvisor list.When I asked Ms. Woolever about these recommendations, she agreed they were perhaps obvious choices, but said Mr. Bourdain wanted to include them because of how much they meant to him, after so many visits to the city. “He wasn’t always (or, arguably, ever) about cool for cool’s sake, or obscurity as its own reward,” she said in an email.If it’s a guide they are after though, travelers may be left wanting. In Cambodia, you get recommendations for three hotels, two markets for dining and a suggestion to check out the temples of Angkor Wat, the country’s most famous attraction by a long shot. It isn’t exactly the list of hole-in-the-wall spots with no addresses that fans of Mr. Bourdain may be hoping for. What those fans will find though is Mr. Bourdain’s word-for-word rant against American military involvement in Cambodia (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) Having those passages — the no-holds-barred monologues that were a hallmark of his television shows — in one place might be the book’s greatest strength.Over the decades that Mr. Bourdain spent traveling the world, there was a lot of talk of the “Bourdain Effect”: how a culinary gem, previously only frequented by those in the know, could be “ruined” by being included in his show. When I asked Ms. Woolever whether she thought this book could amplify that effect, she emphasized that most business owners knew what they were in for when approached by producers. “People call it the ‘Bourdain Effect,’ but Tony didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s something that business owners have to weigh out for themselves.”As I read the book, I was thinking of a different Bourdain Effect, one that feels more vital than ever right now, as travel begins to take its first baby steps back after a year of lockdowns. Seeing so much of Anthony Bourdain’s work in one place and being able to compare his impressions country-by-country in a tightly packed medium, makes it easier to see what he stood for. A traveling philosophy emerges: his utter disdain for stereotypes, his undying commitment to challenging his own preconceptions, his humility in the face of generosity.Because of tragic circumstances following its inception, “World Travel” may feel more like an anthology of greatest hits than a new, original guidebook. But read cover to cover, country by country, it is an enduring embodiment of Anthony Bourdain’s love for the whole world and a reminder of how to stack our priorities the next time we’re able to follow in his footsteps.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More
