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Me and Kaminski
From the internationally bestselling author comes a provocative and wickedly funny novel about two unpredictable men--one an artist and the other a journalist--who together embark on an unexpected adventure with uproarious results.
Book
The shadow in the garden : a biographer's tale
\"The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers' lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas's first subject, the 'self-doomed' poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the 'tall pines, ' as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the merciless pruning of mortality) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, 'a metaphysician of the ordinary.' Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called 'lives, ' Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them--'as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd'\"-- Back cover.
Book
Winifred Gerin
The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), who wrote the lives of all four Bronte siblings, stumbled on her literary vocation on a visit to Haworth, after a difficult decade following the death of her first husband. On the same visit she met her second husband, a Bronte enthusiast twenty years her junior. Together they turned their backs on London to live within sight of the Parsonage, Gerin believing that full understanding of the Brontes required total immersion in their environment. Gerin's childhood and youth, like the Brontes', was characterised by a cultured home and intense imaginative life shared with her sister and two brothers, and by family tragedies (the loss of two siblings in early life). Strong cultural influences formed the children's imagination: polyglot parents, French history, the Crystal Palace, Old Vic productions. Winifred's years at Newnham College, Cambridge were enlivened by eccentric characters such as the legendary lecturer Quiller-Couch (Q'), Lytton Strachey's sister Pernel and Bloomsbury's favourite philosopher, G.E. Moore. Her happy life in Paris with her Belgian cellist husband, Eugene Gerin, was brought to an abrupt end by the Second World War, in which the couple had many adventures: fleeing occupied Belgium, saving Jews in Nice in Vichy France, escaping through Spain and Portugal to England, where they did secret war work for Political Intelligence near Bletchley. After Eugene's death in 1945 Winifred coped with bereavement through poetry and playwriting until discovering her true literary metier on the trip to Haworth. She also wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Fanny Burney. The book is based on her letters and on her unpublished memoir.
eBook
In Absentia: Politics of Religious Life in Maria Carafa’s Vita by Francesco Maggio (1670)
This essay examines the interplay between politics and religion through the lens of correspondence between the future Pope Paul IV and his sister Maria Carafa, largely published in 1670 in Francesco Maria Maggio’s Life of the Venerable Maria Carafa. The analysis reveals how Carafa strategically used this epistolary relationship to shape his public image and religious–political agenda. The letters serve as a carefully crafted narrative tool. Carafa’s portrayal of himself as a leader seeking spiritual guidance from his saintly sister can be interpreted as a calculated political move to legitimize his religious authority and reform initiatives. This correspondence thus becomes a nexus where personal piety and public policy intersect. Maria Carafa’s writings, reconstructed in absentia, offer a perspective on the religious–political landscape of the time. Her role as both sister and spiritual mother to the future pope challenges traditional gender hierarchies within the Church, while also serving Carafa’s narrative of divine guidance for his actions.
Journal Article
Divine Iconoclasm and the Making of Sacred Space in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria
The polemics of idol worship in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria have been interpreted by previous scholars as either the author’s engagement with the Lollard image controversy or a political critique of Henry VI. This essay, however, shifts the focus from Katherine and her iconoclasm to the concept of divine iconoclasm, defined here not only as the divinely sanctioned or divinely motivated destruction of religious images but also as God’s direct intervention to dismantle false representations and correct human perceptions of the divine. It further argues that Capgrave’s Life redefines sacred space as primarily constructed through light, emphasizing its immateriality and exposing the saint’s physical limitations. In these scenarios, divine iconoclasm emerges as a constructive force that resolves the tension between the secular and the sacred. Moreover, Christ’s celestial manipulation of the vision of sacred space and the relationship between body and space—encouraging confidence while discouraging self-inflation—serves as a model for how a monarch should inspire both love and fear. In this way, Capgrave’s Mirrors for Princes is embedded within his hagiography, where the image debate features prominently, addressing the heated political and theological controversies of his time. By combining these elements, the essay bridges two strands of criticism that have previously treated the political and theological dimensions of the text separately.
Journal Article
