André Leon Talley, the legendary fashion editor and stylist, has died at the age of seventy-three. He worked at Interview under Andy Warhol, as the chief of the Women’s Wear Daily’s Paris bureau, and was the creative director and editor at large of Anna Wintour’s Vogue. In a 1994 New Yorker profile, Hilton Als wrote: “Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat ‘colored,’ and almost always gay.” His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, was published in 2020.
The A.V. Club’s staff have been “invited” by management at G/O Media to decide whether to relocate from Chicago to Los Angeles without a cost-of-living raise or to leave their jobs with severance. As of yesterday, seven people have left the publication.
On the occasion of Patricia Highsmith’s birthday, LitHub shares an archival review of her 1952 best-selling romance novel The Price of Salt. In the current issue of Bookforum, you can read Melissa Anderson’s review of Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks, and Terry Castle’s 2016 piece on The Price of Salt and its film adaptation, Carol.
At the New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about Thomas Mann and two recent books: Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (a novel based on Mann’s life) and Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, newly reissued by New York Review Books with an introduction by Mark Lilla. Ross, who claims the mantle of having been “almost unhealthily obsessed with Mann since the age of eighteen,” doesn’t find much in either book that might reignite public interest in the writer. “If Tóibín gives us a somewhat domesticated version of Mann, the new edition of ‘Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man’ trivializes him, reducing the Great Ambiguator to the level of an op-ed columnist.”
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