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Leonardo’s Early Years: Between Fiction and Biography
Florenzer by Phil Melanson (Liveright, 2025) is a historical novel about the youth of Leonardo da Vinci that explores his awakening to sexuality and his formative artistic years. It ends at the moment when Leonardo leaves Florence in 1482, leaving unfinished Adoration … Continue reading
Queerness in Dumas’ Fiction
Reading the latest issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, I stumbled on an article arguing that The Count of Monte Cristo is threaded through with sapphic text and subtext in regard to the relationship between Eugénie Danglars and her … Continue reading
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Tagged Alexandre Dumas, La Dame de Monsoreau
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I recently read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the excellent Norton Critical Edition (2021), edited by Deborah Lutz, after reading the review of the new Stevenson biography (Storyteller, Leo Damrosch, Yale University Press, 2025) in The New … Continue reading
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Tagged Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
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Stan and Gus, Gilded Age and Secrets in New York City
In New York last weekend to see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the opera that opened the season at the Met. Despite the lukewarm review from The New York Times. Clay is homosexual, but it’s a secret he doesn’t accept, … Continue reading
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Tagged Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White
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Flaubert and Caillebotte
While reading Michel Winock’s biography of Flaubert (Gallimard, 2013), I came across these reflections: The trip Flaubert undertook in Brittany with his friend Du Camp proves that, when he wanted to free himself from his mother’s control, Gustave did so … Continue reading
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Tagged Gustate Flaubert, Gustave Caillebotte
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From Gregory to Gloria: How DEI Shapes the Remembrance of a Hemingway
A surprising detail appeared in the recent New York Times obituary of Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s last surviving son, who died at the age of 97. The article referred to his sibling this way: Hemingway’s third child, Gloria Hemingway, was … Continue reading
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Tagged Ernest Hemingway
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A new biography of C. P. Cavafy
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography (G. Jusdanis and P. Jeffreys, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) has been released recently. Its review in the TLS starts with: Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863–1933): a poet of obscure history and an eroticism so gentle, … Continue reading
Paul Yonnet on Gide
From Zone de mort, Stock, 2017 (not translated) : This book of correspondence ends with an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s Notebook 24. In it, he noted down a conversation he had just had with André Gide, in 1925. Gide, who was … Continue reading
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Tagged André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Yonnet
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An Art-Filled Weekend in Chicago
Despite the ridiculous name change (Painting His World) – to make it more “inclusive” according to the Chicago curator Gloria Groom, I enjoyed the Caillebotte exhibition at the Art Institute (Painting Men). The focus and commentary beside the works remain … Continue reading
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Tagged Gustave Caillebotte, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Konstantin Somov
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Random Links
La marche des fiertés 2025 par Willam Marx (Le Monde). He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s the Future King of England, a new Off Broadway play (New York Times).
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