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Articles by Jan Stuart
Debut Novels About Families Fractured by Abuse, Displacement or Death
The Shortlist Aug 16, 2019 A PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS By Ruchika Tomar 344 pp. Riverhead. $27. Image One feels the absence of mothers as much as that of a missing young woman in this scorching desert-noir addition to the shelf of post-“Gone Girl” thrillers.
A Quartet of First Novels Takes Readers From Trinidad to the Himalayas
The Shortlist Feb. 1, 2019 GOLDEN CHILD By Claire Adam 281 pp. SJP for Hogarth. $26. Image Dogs are a looming, watchful presence throughout Adam’s unblinking depiction of a crime-besieged Trinidadian landscape where robbers and kidnappers target the poor and well-off alike and even those who can invest in security systems must be wary of the men who install them.
From Expats to Fortunetelling Accountants, a Pile of Character-Rich Debut Novels
Norbert Zelenka, the soothsayer of Frost’s title, could be a character out of one of those old Ealing Studios comedies in which Alec Guinness played all of the parts: a milquetoast who transforms himself into a player, prodded by a band of dotty but well-meaning elderly ladies. At 73, Norbert is squeaking by on Social Security checks, having rashly given away the millions he had saved as an accountant of 40 years.
First Novels Tackle Sexism and Prejudice, Past and Present
MOTHER OF ALL PIGS By Malu Halasa 259 pp. Unnamed Press. Paper, $16.99. Image “It has always been the same — what men enjoy, women endure.” So says a character in this microcosmic portrait of the contemporary Middle East, where the generational shifts among the members of one Jordanian clan showcase a patriarchal order in slow-motion decline. Halasa’s pungently witty and occasionally uneven novel contrasts the ways in which the women of the Sabas family embrace or push back against tradition.
The New York Times
THE BUTCHER’S HOOK By Janet Ellis 347 pp. Pegasus, $25.95. Photo The sonnets of John Donne provide a brooding counterpoint to the gruesome turns of this nervy historical novel. Ellis’s calculating 19-year-old narrator, Anne Jaccob, dwells in what may be the bleakest house in 18th-century London, shadowed with the family’s grief over Anne’s dead toddler brother, the frailty of her serially miscarrying mother and the caterwauling of her abusive father.
A Peeping Tom tells all
There is a charming website where one can peruse postcard shots of vintage motels along Colfax Avenue, the east-west thoroughfare that cuts a honky-tonk swath from Aurora to Denver, Colo. There were once as many as 250 motels along Colfax, if the real-life subject of Gay Talese’s buzz-generating new book is to be taken at his word. And in one of them, for a time, the private activities of its guests were being secretly watched by its proprietor from a perch above their rooms.
A Blackmailer Lures Men Into Compromising Positions in This Japanese Noir
Deep into Fuminori Nakamura’s new crime novel, a woman is held at gunpoint, taunted by a man practiced in the art of slow torture. “I love looking at people who know they are about to die,” says her tormentor, who having lured her into this tight spot with a lecture on Gnosticism and a grueling group demonstration of extreme sadomasochism, now blathers on about Socrates and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.
Homages - NYTimes.com
“New Yorkers have a special way of moving. They advance ever forward,” says a character in Schulman’s voluptuous novel of Greenwich Village in 1958, when you could catch Carmen McRae at Trude Heller’s nightclub and buy a brownstone on 10th Street for $30,000. Despite their longtime Village pedigree, however, the neighbors and soul mates Earl and Bette are stuck in place.
Faction - NYTimes.com
She slept with Friedrich Engels, but never read a word of his writings. (She couldn’t. She was illiterate.) She doted on Karl Marx’s daughters (who called her Aunt Lizzie) but was abashed at the highfalutin London lifestyle Marx and his wife constructed for the girls’ social advancement.
Harriet Lane’s ‘Her,’ and More
HER By Harriet Lane Little, Brown, $26. The action in this icicle-sharp British chiller kicks in with an act of civic kindness: A stranger returns a dropped wallet to its owner. Unbeknown to the grateful recipient, an overwhelmed homemaker and toddler’s mom named Emma, the wallet was not in fact mislaid. What’s more, Emma shares a distant history with the well-heeled and effortlessly urbane good Samaritan, Nina, which apparently only Nina recalls.
‘The Kill List,’ by Frederick Forsyth, and More
The Shortlist Credit...Illustration by John Gall Sept. 13, 2013 THE KILL LIST By Frederick Forsyth G. P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95. Law enforcers and government officials across England and America are being assassinated in broad daylight by Muslim radicals. Egging them on is Zulfiqar Ali Shah, a k a The Preacher, a cyber-evangelist who exhorts them to murder a notable Westerner in their vicinity.
María Irene Fornés and Tina Howe: Women’s Work
The following essays were prompted, in great part, by Mrs. Centlivre. In 1718, the wife of Queen Anne’s cook wrote a play called A Bold Stroke for a Wife, and in 1985 I came upon this Restoration confection listed in Joseph T. Shipley’s Crown Guide to the World’s Great Plays. Intrigued by the inclusion of Mrs.
Stars & Strife Forever
Twenty-three years ago, a pie-eyed academician’s wife plowed through her front door, surveyed her castle, and brayed, “What a dump!” As we, too, surveyed what seemed in fact to be a comfortable New England living room in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, we might have concluded that her undiplomatic critique was simply a reflection of the messy state of the union between herself and her husband.
Audiences in Action
The practice may never imperil the feudal popularity of the reserved seat, but it’s a verifiable fact that audiences love to be moved around. From the pageant wagons of the medieval mystery plays to the coffee klatsch wanderings of Fefu and Her Friends, theatregoers have embraced the opportunities to break out of their armchair immobility like intrepid teenagers who are handed the car keys for the first time.
Bogart in Bali Hai’i
Anne Bogart is getting used to grumpy cops and angry audiences, although she is neither an unlicensed street peddler nor one of those fascistic Union ushers. On the other hand, it would be well within the range of her peculiar directorial vision to rework Inherit the Wind as a confrontation between Darwinian ushers and fundamentalist pretzel vendors.
From Broadway to Gorky Street (Or, What Would Lenin Say?)
American drama, once banished from the Soviet stage as dangerous, decadent and dirty, is packing them in across the U.S.S.R. Eight different plays by Tennessee Williams are currently running in six different theatres in Moscow—more than in New York. Thousands of miles east of Moscow, smack in the middle of Siberia, the Omsk State Drama Theatre of the Red Banner of Labor staged a wonderfully sensitive and lusty new production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this year.
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