Jean Genet

Happy scandalous anniversary to Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'

2013-03-25 13:56:00

On this date, March 25, in 1957, Allen Ginsberg helped make literary history. That's because 520 copies of his poem "Howl" were seized by U.S. Customs agents on charges of obscenity. Ginsberg and his publisher, City Lights, would fight those charges --...

Jayne Cortez dies at 78; poet and performance artist

2013-01-11 18:54:00

Before the ashes and the anguish, before the 1965 riots and the spotlight of attention that followed, there was a pocket of people already fighting for Watts. They fought for the arts and for the black community from a building on Grandee Avenue and...

Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert teaming up for 'The Maids'

2012-09-06 12:03:00

Some casting news is too intriguing to ignore. Cate Blanchett will team up with French film star�Isabelle Huppert in a staging of Jean Genet's� "The Maids"� next year at the Sydney Theatre Company in Australia. The company unveiled its 2013 season on...

Sherman Hemsley dies at 74; star of TV's 'The Jeffersons'

2012-07-24 19:41:00

Sherman Hemsley, who was rooted in the minds of millions of television viewers as Archie Bunker's bombastic black neighbor, George Jefferson, in"All in the Family" and later as the star of his own long-running sitcom, "The Jeffersons," has died. He was...

On Sunday: Alain Mabanckou, Jonathan Franzen and lumber as history

2012-04-27 16:35:22

Barney Rosset dies at 89; publisher fought censorship

2012-02-23 00:00:00

Barney Rosset, the renegade founder of Grove Press who fought groundbreaking legal battles against censorship and introduced American readers to such provocative writers as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, died Tuesday in...

Fashion Diary: Peter Copping on his Nina Ricci collection

2010-11-14 00:00:00

Although several designers have tried to forge a modern identity for Nina Ricci over the last decade, the French fashion house is still better known for the iconic fragrance L'Air Du Temps (launched in 1948 in the Lalique bottle with glass doves) than for...

Five summers, memorable for the reading

2011-05-22 00:00:00

1974: Unhappy at summer camp, I holed up in my bunk and read Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Bernard Malamud's "The Natural." The camp might have been awful, but the books were anything but. 1980: In June, I attended a writers conference at UC...

A moment with Nina Ricci designer Peter Copping

2010-11-05 16:32:15

Book review: 'Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford' by Leslie Brody

2010-12-15 00:00:00

In their time, the daughters of the second Baron Redesdale, better known as the Mitford sisters, were an industry. Their trade, for the most part, was their mere existence — swanning about British society, leaving scandal and newsprint in their...

Joseph Strick dies at 86; independent filmmaker brought 'Ulysses' to big screen

2010-06-04 00:00:00

Joseph Strick, an independent filmmaker who brought James Joyce's "Ulysses" to the big screen and won an Academy Award for best documentary short subject for "Interviews with My Lai Veterans," has died. He was 86. Strick died of congestive heart...

20 classic works of gay literature

2010-08-04 16:34:36

Isabelle Huppert, pictured, is set to star with Cate Blanchett in a production of Jean Genet's "The Maids" in Australia next year.

2012-09-06 09:23:14