Background
Lesser, Wendy was born on March 20, 1952 in Santa Monica, California, United States. Daughter of Murray Leon Lesser and Millicent (Gerson) Dillon.
(The Pagoda in the Garden is a novel about how things chan...)
The Pagoda in the Garden is a novel about how things changed and how they stayed the same over the course of the twentieth century. Set in England during three distinct time periods between 1901 and 1975, the novel explores the lives of three sets of characters, the major ones being expatriate Americans. The reader meets a master novelist, his acolyte (herself later a master), and her lover; a divorced novelist on the verge of middle-age and the Canadian of indeterminate age who flirts with her; a graduate student at King's College and her English lover. Since the various characters occupy roles that parallel and overlap each other, history (a history that ranges from the death of Queen Victoria to the end of the Vietnam War) comes to seem continuous and cyclical as well as catastrophic and disrupted. Paying acknowledged tribute to the work of Henry James (the title alludes to a passage in The Golden Bowl), The Pagoda in the Garden is above all a novel about human emotions and the sometimes fraught, sometimes amusing complications they give rise to.
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(Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artis...)
Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artists inevitably misrepresent women. She builds this case through inquiry into many unexpected and germane subjects - Marilyn Monroe's walk, for instance, or the dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield", or the shoulder blades of Degas' bathers. Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato's myth of the divided beings and psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets out before the reader an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674392116/?tag=2022091-20
(William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Moveme...)
William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement: Being Reminiscences of Morris' Work as a Propagandist (1921)
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(Fifteen outstanding writers answered editor Wendy Lesser’...)
Fifteen outstanding writers answered editor Wendy Lesser’s call for original essays on the subject of language–the one they grew up with, and the English in which they write.Despite American assumptions about polite Chinese discourse, Amy Tan believes that there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language with which she grew up. Leonard Michaels spoke only Yiddish until he was five, and still found its traces in his English language writing. Belgian-born Luc Sante loved his French Tintin and his Sartre, but only in English could he find “words of one syllable” that evoke American bars and bus stops. And although Louis Begley writes novels in English and addresses family members in Polish, he still speaks French with his wife–the language of their courtship. As intimate as one’s dreams, as private as a secret identity, these essays examine and reveal the writers’ pride, pain, and pleasure in learning a new tongue, revisiting an old one, and reconciling the joys and frustrations of each.
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(Room for Doubt is Wendy Lesser’s account of three separat...)
Room for Doubt is Wendy Lesser’s account of three separate but interlocking occasions for doubt: her stay in Berlin, a city she had never expected to visit; her unwritten book on the philosopher David Hume; and her long friendship with the writer Leonard Michaels, which constantly broke down and yet endured. Through this unusual journey, Lesser in the end shows us how, once examined, things are never quite what she thought they were.
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( In June 1993, as Wendy Lesser sat in an audience of Lon...)
In June 1993, as Wendy Lesser sat in an audience of London's Olivier Theatre waiting to see An Inspector Calls, she knew nothing about Stephen Daldry, the director of the play. She didn't know that he was thirty-three years old, that he was the son of a bank manager and a former cabaret artist, that he had grown up in a Somerset village, that he had joined an Italian circus after taking a degree in English and drama. But when the play began, Lesser found that Daldry spoke to her in a voice she understood: a voice that spoke about the function of theater as art, as entertainment, and as political exhortation. It spoke about the relationship between the world inside and the world outside the theater, about music, language, lighting, sets, and acting. Most of all, it spoke about her role as a member of that particular audience. It made her feel that theater, at its best, can be the most vital and exciting art in the world. Lesser's reaction to this experience was to write A Director Calls. In it, she forges a new kind of theater criticism: one that fills the gap between the professor's scrutiny of a frozen script and the reviewer's response to a frozen performance. She made contact with Daldry and began an in-depth study of his work, sitting through An Inspector Calls and three subsequent productions many different times and in many different formats, watching scene rehearsals, dress rehearsals, previews, and performances, fragments as well as whole performances, discarded versions as well as final ones. The result is stunning: an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on every aspect of theater, from staging, interpretation, and critical response to overheard snippets from actors and stage workers, ideas about music and sound effects, and the financial considerations of producing a play. Particularly compelling is Lesser's analysis of Daldry's gift for collaboration and her detailed description of the intimate relationships that exist between the director and his actors, musicians, technicians, and designers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520212622/?tag=2022091-20
(This book is about murder--in life and in art--and about ...)
This book is about murder--in life and in art--and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the center of Wendy Lesser's investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Our fascination with murder gets its day in court as Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674667360/?tag=2022091-20
(Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artis...)
Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artists inevitably misrepresent women. She builds this case through inquiry into many unexpected and delightfully germane subjects - Marilyn Monroe's walk, for instance, or the dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher in "David Copperfield", or the shoulder blades of Degas's bathers. Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato's myth of the divided beings and psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets before us an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division. By following a developmental, rather than historical, sequence, the book uncovers startling correspondences and fresh insights. It begins by considering Dickens, Lawrence, Harold Brodkey, Peter Handke, and John Berger on the subject of mothers; turns to Degas and the Victorian novelist George Gissing to examine the figure of woman alone, and then to Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock for their perspectives on the battle between the sexes; and then looks at the poetry of Randall Jarrell, the fashion photographs of Cecil Beaton, and the range of artworks inspired by Marilyn Monroe to investigate the central idea of woman as the artist's mirror and secret self. A chapter on Barbara Stanwyck returns us to an essential premise - that art transcends gender boundaries, that the masculine and the feminine coexist within each individual psyche.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674392108/?tag=2022091-20
( Wendy Lesser’s new book is an inspired intellectual ro...)
Wendy Lesser’s new book is an inspired intellectual romp: part memoir, part criticism, though actually a bracing, larkish reinvention of them both” (Lawrence Weschler). Revisiting her favorite books after the passage of twenty or thirty years, Lesser is stirred by the changes she findsin the books, in herself, and in the wider world. If NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME is a book about reading, it is also a book about time, with rereading as a special form of time travel. From classic novels such as ANNA KARENINA and THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY to a charming tale for young adults called I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, from nonfiction by George Orwell and Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth and Milton, from the deeply American HUCKLEBERRY FINN to works in translation like DON QUIXOTE and THE IDIOT, Lesser covers the whole literary spectrum. NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME is a witty and humane exploration of what books can mean to our lives and vice versa, by a writer who has the gift of enabling a reader to grasp the deeper workings of art forms, both high and low, in the act of describing how they affect her” (James Shapiro, New York Times Book Review).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/061808293X/?tag=2022091-20
consultant writer Literary magazine editor
Lesser, Wendy was born on March 20, 1952 in Santa Monica, California, United States. Daughter of Murray Leon Lesser and Millicent (Gerson) Dillon.
Bachelor, Harvard University, 1973; Master of Arts, Cambridge (England) University, 1975; Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, 1982.
Lesser did her undergraduate work at Harvard College and her graduate work at University of California, Berkeley, with time in between at King"s College, Cambridge. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and author of ten books, including one novel, The Pagoda in the Garden (Other Press, 2005), and her latest nonfiction book, Why I Read (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).
(Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Q...)
(Room for Doubt is Wendy Lesser’s account of three separat...)
( Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focu...)
( In June 1993, as Wendy Lesser sat in an audience of Lon...)
(Fifteen outstanding writers answered editor Wendy Lesser’...)
( Wendy Lesser’s new book is an inspired intellectual ro...)
( "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, ...)
(SIGNED VERY GOOD FIRST EDITION dust jacket hardcover, cle...)
(The Pagoda in the Garden is a novel about how things chan...)
(William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Moveme...)
(The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters by Lesser, We...)
(This book is about murder--in life and in art--and about ...)
(Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artis...)
(Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artis...)
(Reprint)
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dedalus Foundation, and the New York Public Library"s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among other places.
Married Richard Rizzo, January 18, 1985. 1 stepchild, Dov Antonio. 1 child, Nicholas.