My latest post on Now Smell This is an interview with Alyssa Harad, fellow perfume blogger and author of the wonderful new book “Coming to My Senses.” You can read the interview here.
Category: Books and Other Reading
My Back Pages: Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins
As I think back on books that piqued my early interest in fragrance, I can include quite a few examples of “young adult” literature. Like many girls, I was an avid reader of Louisa May Alcott’s work during my pre-teen years—Little Women, of course, but also lesser-known novels like An Old-Fashioned Girl and Eight Cousins.
Continue reading “My Back Pages: Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins”
My Back Pages: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day”
In 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald published a short story titled “May Day” in the literary magazine Smart Set. He had only recently become a sensation for his first novel This Side of Paradise, and he hadn’t even written The Great Gatsby yet, but he was already recognized as one of the voices of the inter-war “Jazz Age” generation.
Continue reading “My Back Pages: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day””
My Back Pages: A Streetcar Named Desire
I have a feeling that I read Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” before I ever saw the film adaptation directed by Elia Kazan. I seem to remember checking out some Williams plays from the public library one summer during my teen years, since I’d enjoyed reading “The Glass Menagerie” for school and wanted to know more of his work.
Re-reading the play years later, and seeing the masterful film version as an adult woman, I feel a heart-wrenching sympathy for the fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois. She’s a tragic figure, with all her deceptions and vanities and her reluctance to look harsh reality in the face. “I don’t want realism,” she cries. “I want magic!”
My Back Pages: George Orwell’s 1984
During freshman year of high school, my literature class was required to read 1984 (or, to be absolutely correct, Nineteen Eighty-Four) by George Orwell. Some of the novel’s finer points probably went over our heads, but we grasped the main concepts. The story of protagonist Winston Smith and his doomed personal rebellion against “Big Brother” and the Party that governs every detail of his life is a powerful one, even if you’re just fourteen years old and don’t really know all the historical context that surrounded the writing of the book. Continue reading “My Back Pages: George Orwell’s 1984”
TINSEL CREATION 