In Molly G. Yarn’s new book, Shakespeare’s “Lady Editors,” the scholar recovers the lives of more than sixty women who have edited the Bard. Yarn recently told The Guardian, “These things matter because the editor shapes and presents the text to readers—editing isn’t a neutral task.”
Melissa Anderson reviews Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, Benedetta, which is about the Renaissance-era lesbian prophetess Sister Benedetta Carlini “whose life epitomizes the Dutch provocateur’s most abiding theme—sex and power.” You can read more about Benedetta in Moira Donegan’s contribution to Bookforum’s “Heaven and Hell” issue from summer 2020.
For The Point, Kylie Warner writes about Shirley Hazzard’s preoccupation with office life. Warner focuses on People in Glass Houses, Hazzard’s 1963 collection of linked stories about employees at a UN stand-in called “the Organization.” Contemporary readers might learn from the mistakes of Glass Houses’s characters, who lack “the resistance to romanticizing one’s work and one’s superiors, the ability to approach office life as a skeptical outsider, the discernment to know when the compromises become too great.”
Alden Global Capital’s bid to acquire Lee Enterprises—one of the few newspaper chains Alden hasn’t absorbed—has been turned down.
In Vanity Fair, Charlotte Klein writes about the mutual frustration between the president and the press corps: “While Biden was always expected to be more low-key than his media-obsessed predecessor, the president’s level of engagement with the press during his first year in office has left White House reporters grumbling and Democratic allies urging him to more aggressively sell his agenda.”
Elisa Gabbert picks her favorite seven poetry collections of the year, including Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, Callie Garnett’s Wings in Time, and Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Blood on the Fog.