By Bruce Buschel GQ February 1987 Wynton Marsalis leans forward, peers through his glasses and says with his usual fervor, “People actually want to discuss music with me. Me! Their knowledge of music is so limited that I don’t understand how they even think they can...
By Judith Rossner The Movies November 1983 Pornography, erotica, fantasies of beautiful women are probably as old as excess energy and leisure time. It was Hugh Hefner’s inspiration to bring them, on a large scale and slickly packaged, into the middle-class living...
By Kevin Koczwara The Stacks Reader February 2, 2020 The calm and quiet of upstate Vermont—past Burlington and Winooski, almost to the border of sleepy Canada, but before Montreal—is where Glenn Stout calls home. The world stops there. Or so it seems. The pace of life...
By O’Connell Driscoll Rolling Stone August 11, 1977 One: A Backstage Party September 1976: The Performer’s Lounge, Backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. A windowless basement room with concrete-block walls. The furniture consists of several couches, some...
By Gloria Emerson The Movies November 1983 I did not suspect until recently that a large number of journalists rapidly converging on the capital of a small, poor country in great trouble might be a chilling sight. For nearly a decade I had often been part of such a...
By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc June 1980 Shelley Winters has written the story of her life. Anyone who has followed her flourishing career on the talk show circuit will be pardoned for asking what she possibly has left to tell. The TV addict who really keeps track of...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader January 24, 2020 In the late ’70s, Kenneth Tynan wrote a handful of long, entertaining profiles for The New Yorker—later collection in Show People. It’s our good fortune that the good folks down at Conde Nast see fit to make one of...
By Fred Schruers The Washington Post December 13, 1981 Ivan Passer’s film Cutter’s Way, now at the Key Theater, is one of those rare movies that has led a heroic life of its own. Like a boxer in some Hollywood ring drama, beset by skeptics and loan sharks and battered...
By James Kaplan Entertainment Weekly May 17, 1991 She is small, and her hair looks terrible. Distressed. Long and ratty, a bad white-yellow with a greenish tinge (dark roots are struggling back), it appears to have fallen victim to one too many dye jobs. Blond...
By Fred Schruers The Washington Post May 8, 1983 Last night at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy played to a glittering crowd at the new Palais des Festivals, appearing as the prestigious opening-night entry in the competition. Back...
By Brock Brower Life September 24, 1965 At this point in his literary career, Norman Mailer really ought—at least as a source of metaphor—to Quit the Ring. He has, as they say, heart, a lot of heart, but even if he’s right—that Papa Hemingway threw him and his entire...
By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc June 1979 In this age of hard sell, when even the most reticent author can be coaxed into a half-hour on camera with Dick Cavett, J. D. Salinger obdurately remains publishing’s invisible man. This is, of course, hard on his admirers, who...
