GLR May-June 2026

B R I E F S and Hamilton . It makes the extensive subject accessible to students, scholars, and stage door theater enthusiasts. A crafty “Intermis sion” is a legacy chain linking Oscar

Donati moves on to Salò. By the 1970s, many Italian movies were moving away from the sexual intensity, perversion, and sadistic violence of Pasolini’s writings and films. Italy was experiencing the “Years of Lead,” a time of political turmoil, violence, and death. Pasolini’s output was full of accusations about what he saw as a resurfacing of fascism. Brash and confident, Pasolini is warned that he’s moving into dangerous territory. Heedless of such charges, Donati and Nicholas are preoccupied with helping to bring Salò to life. It’s released just months after Pasolini is brutally murdered in November 1975, leaving Donati and Nicholas to deal with the aftermath. J OE R YAN THIRST TRAP: A Novel by Gráinne O’Hare Crown. 288 pages, $28. Gráinne O’Hare’s debut novel is a brassy, biting tale of three Belfast women on the cusp of their thirties mourning the death of their friend and roommate. A novel of grief, gallows humor, rock bottoms, and self-ex ploration, Thirst Trap is a hilarious, bitter sweet ride. Friends since childhood, Maggie, Harley, and Róise live in a rundown South Belfast apartment, each squeezing out the last gasp of their twenties. Maggie is a forlorn lesbian in the throes of a casual relationship with a bisex ual woman, Cate. Harley is a hard-partying waitress who lives off one-night stands, booze, and drugs. Róise works at a recruitment agency where she lusts after her boss, Adam. Their journeys are filled with challenges and disappointments, with surprises sprinkled throughout the year all will turn thirty, The book begins with them celebrating Harley’s thirtieth birthday the night before the first anniversary of their roommate Lydia’s death. They’re each spiraling from the loss and lamenting an argument with Lydia the night before she died. No one has the courage to change her room. The novel portrays drug use realistically, with Harley involved in a flirtation with their landlord-cum-coke dealer Frankie. Maggie struggles with her self-esteem and her Cate obsession by seeing an ineffective therapist; Harley secretly takes piano lessons while her partying complicates every area of her life, and Róise continues on a bumpy road with Adam while concealing her eating disorder. The novel shifts expertly between emotional moments and humor as they indulge in de structive behaviors, not quite ready to leave the party. It’s a fun ride with an edge, depict ing friendship, mourning, and letting go of the past, resulting in a rich story of women facing adulthood together. M ONICA C ARTER

IN THE BLOOD by Carl Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 128 pages, $18. In an age of instant everything, I’m surprised that poetry continues to be valued, because poems don’t happen quickly. They take time to write and time to read. They require the reader to pause, listen carefully, and dis cover, if the poem succeeds, the nuanced na ture of reality. Carl Phillips’ poems explore how the “I” and the other—be it an object, a room, a place, or a lover—interact. His mind is alive with contraries. He invites us to no tice what’s often unseen and to experience how life is dressed in sensation but often dis guised in uncertainties. Phillips’ first book, the newly republished In the Blood , took the poetry world by storm in 1992, so it’s refreshing to hear how he be came a poet and what, in his mind, a good poem should do. He tells how he learned the craft but also had to learn “vulnerability, which gives authority to a poem, makes it a thing to believe in and trust, by reminding the reader that behind the poem is an actual human being who speaks not with detach ment but from experience.” He also tells how, as he was learning to write, he was coming out as a gay man. His poems have the raw, sensual urgency of someone first discovering his love for other men. In “Lov ing the Town Planner,” he plays with the im agery of exterior design: “you’ll take me/ to your room, show me the new air conditioner, and/ look at my body as at a small island whose far side/ keeps rolling from view into sheets of fog,/ just when you think you’ve got it all/ mapped and on paper.” His poems invite you to a place where the sensual speaks of vulnerability and love, a place where, in these hurried days, we all need to dwell. B RUCE S PANG BROADWAY NATION How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Ar ti sts Invented the Broadway Musical by David Armstrong Methuen Drama. 456 pages, $34.95 However much you know about Broadway musicals, David Armstrong probably knows more. The playwright, producer, professor, and podcast host shares his expertise in the comprehensive and thoroughly researched Broadway Nation . Despite its erudition, Armstrong’s conversational manner makes the book entertaining. A major strength is its thematic organiza tion, focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and tribalism as a central through-line. A handy reference guide allows readers to scan sections of interest—19th century burlesque, early 20th century vaudeville, the 1930s’ rol licking Anything Goes, this century’s Wicked

Hammerstein and Jerome Kern with Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda, suggest ing what’s been “inherited, copied, imitated, rejected, embraced, and absorbed.” Arm strong lightens what could have been a dry treatise with highlights occasionally border ing on backstage gossip. “Female imperson ator” Julian Eltinge is captured in a “gender illusion” photo as both bride and groom; cockeyed optimist Mary Martin had a “com plicated” personal life involving a husband, a manager, and actress Janet Gaynor. One of the most enlightening chapters is the last: “We Know We Belong to the Land,” which emphasizes musical theater’s commu nal nature. Armstrong contends that the “Tra dition” of Anatevka’s shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof relates to the “conservative evangelical Christian values” of the weddings in Guys andDolls . He draws a connection between the “dissenter, nonconformist outcast” in Oklahoma! and the dynamic tensions be tween West Side Story ’s Jets and Sharks. His encyclopedic knowledge in Broadway Nation is a superlative contribution to the rich range of the Broadway musical. R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK THE SILVER BOOK: A Novel by Olivia Laing Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256 pages, $27. Set in Cinecittà, Italy’s largest film studio during the post-World War II era, when Visconti, Zeffirelli, Fellini, and Pasolini led a cohort of Italian film masters, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is grounded in the life of designer Danilo Donati. A master of costumes and set designs, he brings visual splendor to movies and operas alike. In the early 1970s, he briefly lives in Venice before submerging himself in Fellini’s Casanova and Pasolini’s Salò . Donati sees Nicholas Wade, a graduate of a London art school, huddled on the steps of the church San Vidal, fully engaged in drawing. What a Renaissance angel with flaming red hair and lustrous white skin, Donati muses. Though old enough to be his father, Donati offers Nicholas sandwiches, and a love affair begins. Rushing to Rome, they fall into a comfortable routine of sharing life and bed. Time is spent on masterful drawings by Nicholas and exuberant costumes and set designs by Donati. When Casanova goes into production, Fellini imposes his own graphic design on the film, frustrating Donati’s artistic sensibilities. Exasperated by delays on Casanova ,

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