Stalking Shakespeare

November 1, 2022

With Bruno Schulz, the Sami Rohr Prize--winning Balint revisits the celebrated Polish Jewish author/artist, focusing on the rediscovery of murals Schulz was compelled to paint at an SS villa and the question raised when they were smuggled to Jerusalem: who can claim the legacy of those, like Schulz, who perished in the Holocaust? Actor, stand-up comedian, and significant MTV player since its inception, Bellamy talks about quitting his corporate job and smashing race and class barriers as he rose to Top Billin' in the entertainment industry (100,000-copy first printing). An expansion of New York Times best-selling memoirist Dederer's viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Monsters considers whether genius gives male artists from Polanski to Picasso the license for malicious behavior and whether male and female monstrosity are the same (35,000-copy first printing). With Honey, Baby, Mine, celebrated actress Dern and her equally celebrated mother Ladd share intimate conversations they've had, sparked by Ladd's illness (500,000-copy first printing). After his divorce, Mississippi novelist Durkee sneaked off to a fishing shack in Vermont and started Stalking Shakespeare, facing down know-it-all curators as he looked for a portrait of the Bard that could verifiably be shown to have been painted from life. A novelist, playwright, and biographer of Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, Greenfield takes a long look at multi-Obie-winning playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard in True West (40,000-copy first printing). An esteemed dance critic who wrote for the Village Voice for over four decades, Jowitt limns the life and works of groundbreaking modern dance choreographer Martha Graham in the smartly named Errand into the Maze; it's the title of one of Graham's best-known pieces (20,000-copy first printing). Prize-winning poet Schoenberger, also author of Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, does a deep dive into the character of Tennessee Williams's iconic Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire (40,000-copy first printing). In Nothing Stays Put, Wall Street Journal contributor Spiegelman unearths the life of Amy Clampitt, a celebrated poet (and personal favorite) who published her first of five acclaimed collections when she was 63 and went on to win a MacArthur fellowship.

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March 1, 2023
Diving into the mystery of Shakespeare's identity. During the many long winters he spent living in Vermont, essayist and fiction writer Durkee, encountering a host of different images of the lauded English bard, became obsessed with discovering what Shakespeare really looked like. Although neither an art historian nor literary scholar, Durkee became a determined, fearless researcher, hounding librarians, traveling to libraries--including the famed Folger collection in Washington, D.C.--and reading everything he could find about Shakespeare's life and times, historical trends in portraiture, literary controversies about authorship, art historical debates, and the often scandalous world of the Elizabethan court. Durkee came to see his lack of expertise as a plus: "The dilettante works alone, a solitary figure, no colleagues to shock, no tenure at risk. Not only are we free to ask naive questions, there's nobody around to tell us how things are supposed to be done." Besides barraging librarians and museum personnel with questions, he conducted his own meticulous investigations, comparing facial anomalies in portraits, for example, by layering two portrait jpegs on top of each other. He examined X-rays of paintings with a magnifying glass, and he traced the provenance of purported likenesses of Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries. He also investigated the work of restorers. "My research," he writes, "became something magical and demented, intuitive and haunted. In the end it changed the way I look at history, art, politics, and myself. It certainly changed the way I look at William Shakespeare." Part of that magical aura apparently came from Adderall, which a sympathetic doctor prescribed for Durkee's self-diagnosed ADHD. Durkee recounts his adventure with self-deprecating humor, which belies the seriousness of his project. "For the most part, Shakespeare ad vivum," he writes ruefully, "has been a history of artistic con men and starry-eyed scholars." A lively report of a passionate quest that should appeal to any fan of the Bard.

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