Phyllis Rose ist eine amerikanische Literaturkritikerin und Essayistin, deren Werk sich oft tiefgründigen Fragen der menschlichen Natur und Kultur widmet. Ihre aufschlussreichen Essays und Biografien werden für ihre Intelligenz und Vorstellungskraft geschätzt. Rose erforscht die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Leben mit einer scharfen Perspektive.
Josephine Baker, Tochter einer schwarzen Wäscherin aus St. Louis, wurde zu einer tanzenden Legende. Obwohl die gesellschaftlichen Umstände es ihr nicht leicht machten, setzte sie sich über Schwierigkeiten hinweg und wurde mit ihrer mutigen Haltung zu einer Art Kultfigur.
Phyllis Rose examines five famous Victorian marriages. Raising questions about the politics of sex and the expectations of marriage, she probes inherited myths and assumptions. Of the five marriages or parallel lives explored here, that of John Ruskin and Effie Gray was unconsummated, those of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were almost certainly chaste, the Dickens' marriage degenerated into melodrama and the liaison between George Eliot and G.H. Lewes, which scandalised London society, was the happiest of the lot
Author Phyllis Rose describes the impact of reading Proust during her midlife
Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood - Advance Reading Copy Not for Sale
A brilliant and moving evocation of the rhythms of life (and the darker shadows below it) in a working-class quarter of the world’s most fascinating and divided city.In the tradition of the literature of place perfected by such expatriate writers as M. F. K. Fisher and Isak Dinesen, Adina Hoffman’s House of Windows compellingly evokes Jerusalem through the prism of the neighborhood where she has lived for eight years since moving from the United States. In a series of interlocking sketches and intimate portraits of the inhabitants of Musrara, a neighborhood on the border of the western (Jewish) and eastern (Arab) sides of the city–a Sephardic grocer, an aging civil servant, a Palestinian gardener, a nosy mother of ten–Hoffman constructs an intimate view of Jerusalem life that will be a revelation to American readers bombarded with politics and headlines. By focusing on the day-to-day pace of existence in this close-knit community, she provides a rich, precise, and refreshingly honest portrait of a city often reduced to cliche–and takes in the larger question of identity and exile that haunts Jews and Palestinians alike.
