Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (b. 1923–d. 2007) was one of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, Mailer attended Harvard University with the initial intent of becoming an aeronautical engineer. However, his writing classes at Harvard took him in a different direction and while he earned a degree in engineering, his career plans had shifted by the time of his graduation in 1943. Mailer was drafted into the army in 1944, and his experiences stationed in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry became the foundation for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948). This novel, published to critical acclaim and commercial success, made Mailer a literary celebrity at a very young age, and he grappled with the ramifications of this early success for much of his life. Over the course of his ensuing career, which spanned nearly six decades, Mailer went on to publish over forty books, his works traversing a variety of genres across fiction and nonfiction. He was also a founder of the Village Voice in 1955, and his involvement in that publication ignited his career as a journalist and cultural critic. The 1960s and 1970s are often considered the height of Mailer’s creative output and renown: during this time, Mailer published three novels, a book of poetry, a play, a collection of short stories, and ten nonfiction books, and he also directed three experimental films. He regularly contributed to Esquire magazine, where he published “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a prime example of the emerging style of New Journalism. He participated in the march on the Pentagon in 1967, covering the experience in The Armies of the Night (1968), which was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize again for The Executioner’s Song, his 1979 nonfiction novel about convicted killer and death row inmate Gary Gilmore. During these decades, Mailer also cemented his reputation as a public intellectual, not without controversy, speaking out publicly against the Vietnam War, running for mayor of New York in 1969, engaging in televised debates with his peers, covering political campaigns, and more. Mailer focused more pointedly on the novel and literary biography from the 1980s onward, but he continued to offer incisive cultural commentary. He wrote until his death, and his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), was a New York Times bestseller.

Songbooks

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

Ideological Commitment in Modern African Poetry: Redefining Cultural Aesthetics in Selected Poems of Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth and Village Voice

<p>In this study, ideological commitment to cultural norms is a standpoint that has led to the development of modern African poetry. The Modern African poet is seen as an advocate for cultural prowess and transformation and as such naturally adopts this African traditional antecedent in his poems. Several critical studies on the two collections have focused on the stylistic and literary values of Osundare’s craft without appropriate reviews on the poet's use of cultural forms to reflect his ideological stance on pertinent issues affecting the society. The descriptive qualitative content analysis method was used to show how the selected poems reflect Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity as expressed through the shifting of cultural margins in the society, thus, illustrating the use of cultural art forms as a means of appreciating nature and exploring issues of exploitation and marginalization. The study also examines the influence of the traditional Yoruba African culture on the poet with an adequate focus on the content and devices of orature, proverbs, riddles, parables, humor, satire, and traditional forms of language. The study submits that the poet adequately incorporated the ideals of culture and its elements in his enduring craft showing his allegiance to his folk cultural patterns.</p>

Colson Whitehead

Over the course of a career now in its third decade, Colson Whitehead has produced a nine-book oeuvre that has made him one of the foremost 21st-century American literary authors. Born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead in New York on November 6, 1969, he spent his childhood and adolescence devouring pop culture—in particular, science fiction and horror films. His early years were generally divided between Manhattan and his family’s summer home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. In 1987, he began studying literature at Harvard University, where he befriended poet and editor Kevin Young and other members of the influential Dark Room Collective. After graduation, he spent several years in New York writing for the Village Voice. During this time, he also started working on what eventually became his debut novel, The Intuitionist (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Although his initial readership remained relatively small, Whitehead’s critical reputation grew quickly, with each of his first two books earning rave reviews and literary prizes. The Intuitionist was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction and his second novel, John Henry Days (New York: Doubleday, 2001), won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a prize given to exemplary American literary works dealing with racism and diversity. John Henry Days was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2000, he received the Whiting Award, which supports promising new writers, and then followed that up with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (colloquially known as a “Genius Grant”) in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Although his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 2006), was less critically lauded, it nevertheless won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, which recognizes outstanding multicultural literature. Over the next decade, Whitehead’s readership began to catch up with his critical acclaim and each of his subsequent five novels has landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016) has been his most noteworthy book to date, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list, as well as earning him the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the National Book Award, and public endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, among others. He followed this success up with a short historical novel, The Nickel Boys (New York: Doubleday, 2019), whose release was accompanied both by considerable fanfare (including Whitehead’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine) and continued critical praise. Although he has gravitated away from the comic-satirical tenor of his earlier work, Whitehead remains both a masterful prose stylist and a pointed social critic.

Dune

David Lynch's Dune (1984) is the film that science fiction — and the director's most ardent fans — can neither forgive nor forget. Frank Herbert's original 1965 novel built a meticulous universe of dark majesty and justice, as wild-eyed freedom fighters and relentless authoritarians all struggled for control of the desert planet Arrakis and its mystical, life-extending “spice.” After several attempts to produce a film, Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis and his producer daughter Raffaella would enlist David Lynch, whose Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980) had already marked him out as a visionary director. What emerges out of their strange, long process is a deeply unique vision of the distant future; an eclectic bazaar of wood-turned spaceship interiors, spitting tyrants, and dream montages. Lynch's film was “steeped in an ancient primordial nastiness that has nothing to do with the sci-fi film as we currently know it,” as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman put it — only with time becoming a cult classic. This book is the first long-form critical study of the film; it delves into the relationship with the novel, the rapidly changing context of early 1980s science fiction, and takes a close look at Lynch's attempt to breathe sincerity and mysticism into a blockbuster movie format that was shifting radically around him.

Alive Still

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

Paris, Poets, and Poverty

Freelance income and frugality allowed Nell to embark on her first trip abroad in 1950. In Paris, she felt as though she had stepped into an Impressionist landscape. Bowled over by Chartres Cathedral and the museums, she also visited two of her art idols, Jean Hélion and Fernand Léger. She became involved with a German woman with whom she traveled to Florence and Rome. Back in New York, while living with Midi Garth, she enjoyed hanging out with several of the poets later known as the New York School: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Bebop records played at her boisterous parties, which often included marathon games of poker. In her painting, she had embarked on a period of experimentation with figurative imagery. Midi and Brook evokes a pastoral scene in Vermont, where the women vacationed. Meanwhile, her freelance work included serving as designer of the Village Voice.