PositiveLos Angeles Times... scrumptious ... [Fierstein] delivers plenty of dish, some of which leaves a bitter aftertaste. But his writing is most alive in the early years, before he becomes a Broadway institution ... A natural storyteller with a yenta’s love of mischief, Fierstein paints a vivid portrait of his youth in Bensonhurst ... Fierstein’s dings are often dressed in self-flattery ... to his credit, he is often scathingly honest about himself. He writes courageously about his alcoholism ... could have used more of this kind of soul-searching. The Harvey Fierstein glimpsed here is tantalizingly, defiantly, irreducibly complex. It’s a pity Sondheim isn’t around to offer the contradictory protagonist of this memoir the musical he deserves.
Michael Riedel
PositiveLos Angeles TimesReading Riedel has long been mandatory for theater insiders. They may complain about his journalistic practices, his tendency to sensationalize and distort, his refusal to let a fair review of the facts get in the way of a good scoop, his speculative and often erroneous conclusions. But his copy is sinfully entertaining, full of dish and drama and delivered with the wicked wit Broadway pros can’t help but admire ... An equal opportunity offender, Riedel is in no one’s pocket. His contrary streak makes his reporting essential even if his proximity to the material hampers his storytelling.
Alice Munro
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesThe casually impeccable stories in her latest collection, Dear Life, are somewhat more traditional in that they are largely focused on a defining episode of a character’s life. It’s still possible to piece together a broader history — Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind — but the scope has tightened ... The plots, if it’s possible to call such natural seeming accounts plots, build to big cinematic scenes ... No story is quite as haunting as \'Amundsen,\' the tale of an abortive engagement between a young teacher who takes a job at a tubercular hospital in a wintry rural outpost and the presiding doctor who is all business even when making love ... The classic Munro figure of a woman, usually with unfulfilled literary yearnings, making a getaway from a stale or stifling marriage appears repeatedly, though the balance sheet of happiness isn’t altered for long by new passion ... Dear Life has something of a valedictory quality to it, but the consciousness behind these stories has a vitality that, thankfully, seems in no danger of ending any time soon.
Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
Rave4ColumnsThis wide-ranging anthology, selected by Darryl Pinckney, acquaints a new generation of readers not with the story of Hardwick’s life but with the style and shape of her consciousness — what Wilde called 'the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind' ... Elizabeth Hardwick: the name itself evokes her impressionistic prose, as stately as a royal ship yet as unpredictable as the churning sea ... Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, this collection is admittedly a bit of a grab bag ...this volume offers a welcome counter-model in our age of hot takes and microwaved analyses ...dissenting correctives, dryly mocking the erroneous assumptions of scholars and biographers while delighting in the subversive truths of artists ... Hardwick’s own flamboyant sentences are choreographed to amaze with their kinetic punctuation... By maintaining the novelist’s prerogative for vivid portraiture, Hardwick made criticism sing.
