RaveLambda Literary... a succinct and readable portrait of the short-lived and charismatic lesbian writer and illustrator ... With Brody’s storytelling, Fitzhugh’s personality resonates distinctly, deliciously, to a degree that the reader falls in love with Fitzhugh as much as with the heroine of any good novel. Privacy, after all, does not equal shyness ... Wherever Brody’s research hits the sealed lips of former lovers or estates, the biographer leaves spaces alive and lets secrets and omissions speak for themselves—she paints a distinct enough character of Fitzhugh for the reader to fill in the blanks. What she does end up uncovering of Fitzhugh’s life story, Brody seems to suggest, like many queer histories, was never truly hidden. It was just kept slightly out of the spotlight of a hetero-centric world ... The mysteries at the heart of this biography, alongside its depictions of various eras of queer literary New York City, only make for an even more compelling read. And Brody’s complex depiction of Fitzhugh, with her contradictions and idiosyncrasies, her tireless work and quest for artistic fulfillment, becomes a refreshing study of the arduous process and pay-offs of creativity itself: its fits, its dead ends, its blinding inspirations, leaving behind a vast and complicated legacy that might, in the end, emit one truly great achievement, a single character and her unforgettable name—Harriet the Spy.
Alex Ross
PositiveLambda LiteraryNew Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ newest opus of nearly 700 pages, Wagnerism , posits that we live our lives almost unaware of the currents that have shaped the cultural content we consume, the world through which we move. An account of composer Richard Wagner’s influence on the past 160 or so years, Wagnerism is neither a biography of Wagner nor an analysis of his music, but a grappling with Wagnerism itself and how it has shaped the world beyond music. Following Alex Ross’ two volumes of music criticism and history–The Rest is Noise and Listen to This — Wagnerism becomes a biography of a culture’s history of influence, spreading outwards from Wagner himself and across the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. Much like the structure of Wagner’s music–seemingly endless, not just temporally but musically, in its addictive linking of melodies and motifs so that the end and beginning of whole sequences become indistinguishable–Wagnerian figurations appear and reappear in the chronology of time. Extending into a much larger and consistently more urgent cultural question, Wagnerism asks: how do we separate art from artist? Myth from culture? Culture from Myth? Must we? Can we? Can we not, and still live with the dissonance?
