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      For Tina Louise, Escape, Finally, From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

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      Ms. Louise would prefer to not to talk about Ginger, her breathy sitcom character from the 1960s. Luckily, to the children she tutors, she’s just Ms. Tina.The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the teacher gives her, like “All Aboard!” or “How to Catch a Witch.” When her time is up, she’ll head home.None of the children will have any idea that Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island” — in real life, the actress Tina Louise — just spent the best 60 minutes of her week with them.Ms. Louise does not like to talk about the television show that made her a household name. She has no desire to revisit the years between 1964 and 1967, when she was marooned with six oddballs and a trunk full of slinky, sequined gowns.Through its run of 98 episodes, “Gilligan’s Island” was a prime-time success and became a Gen X touchstone in reruns. (The question of “Ginger or Mary Ann?” can still evoke passionate debate among men of a certain age.) As for Ms. Louise, she can barely utter the name of the program, referring to it as “G.I.” or “The Series.”CBS, via Getty ImagesIt’s not that she regrets it, although she and the cast never received residuals. “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said in a recent conversation from her modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is the show’s last living cast member, and she recently celebrated a birthday she’d prefer not to discuss. (“I’m 29,” she said coyly.) She still has the signature beauty that made her famous, now on display in jeans and a black T-shirt instead of fancy gowns.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Find the Hidden Book Titles by Irish Authors and Poets

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      The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.”The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.”The circle of friends, all in starter jobs and trying to juggle the commitments of their jobs, tried to meet up at least one night a month, knowing it was small things like these get-togethers that made the city better.The gathering always took place beside the Brooklyn Bridge, at a restaurant between the old coffee barge that hosted chamber music and the busy lobster-roll shack that was a haven for hungry sea gulls ransacking the tower of food trash.Just as the table chatter turned to league football, a tiki-bar boat full of baseball fans dancing on deck with Mr. and Mrs. Met blasted by at top volume. “That’s enough to make normal people think they were seeing things,” said Sean.“’Tis,” said Brendan. “The East River may lack the stoic charm of the sea but you can’t beat it for the entertainment.” More

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      Book Review: ‘When the Going Was Good,’ by Graydon Carter

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      The former Vanity Fair editor reflects on an era’s power moves and expense-account adventures in a new memoir.WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter, with James FoxLorne. Graydon. Keith. Three abiding kings of New York City’s cultural life are the subjects of new books. Lorne is Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” who is examined under the stereo microscope that is Susan Morrison’s biography, “Lorne.” Graydon is Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the stinging magazine Spy in the 1980s and the editor of Vanity Fair during its plumpest and happiest decades, whose memoir is our topic today. Keith is Keith McNally, the proprietor of that consummate French bistro Balthazar — which is so well run, so well lit and so well victualed that surely one idea of a good death is to deliquesce in one of its red leather banquettes — who has a memoir out soon.Lorne is 80; Graydon, 75; Keith, 73. Each is still very much in the game. But to have these books in a clump on my coffee table has given me an Auld Lang Syne-ish feeling. An era is approaching its end.Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” runs on two overlapping tracks. It’s the story of an underdog — the hockey-playing, Canadian-born son of an air force pilot — who morphs into a crisply dressed and flamboyantly maned overdog. It is, figuratively, the story of a young man who walks into Gotham barefoot and leaves, whistling, owning the keys to one of its castles.A class journey is described as well. The consumption grows conspicuous and conspicuouser. Thorstein Veblen’s eyes would pinwheel. By the second half, Carter can’t seem to get out of a paragraph without mentioning his possession of the perfect apartment, or vintage car, or bespoke suit, or excursion, or hotel suite, or weekend house, or restaurant table, or friend (Fran Lebowitz), or pajamas or fishing camp.D.H. Lawrence held a class animus against the Bloomsbury group; Pauline Kael distrusted the high-living Joan Didion. Paul Theroux called luxury the enemy of observation. This is another way of saying that Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate.Let us get three drawbacks out of the way. 1) Although Carter wrote “When the Going Was Good” with James Fox, a co-author of Keith Richards’s electric memoir, the prose is basic. Anyone who comes in hoping for a tincture of the old Spy style — ironic, wised-up, dense with intellect and allusion — will be disappointed. 2) Carter is not one for introspection. There are no “Rosebud” moments. 3) He doesn’t talk about his signature, wide-winged, George Washington-esque hair, with its Nike whoosh up the center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

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      An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.In addition to halting book promotions and sales, Ms. Wynn-Williams must refrain from engaging in or “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments,” according to the filing. She also must retract all previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control.”The filing did not appear to limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir.“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” was released last week.Flatiron, via Associated PressMeta has vehemently denied the allegations in the book.The book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for cause, he added, and an investigation at the time determined that “she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”A spokeswoman for Flatiron Books did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Ms. Wynn-Williams, who worked at what was then called Facebook from 2011 to 2018, did not comment.The move to publish the arbitration filing is one of Meta’s most forceful public repudiations of a former employee’s tell-all memoir, several of which have been published over the past two decades.Meta executives have also responded online to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s claims, calling most of them wildly exaggerated or flat-out false.It is unclear whether Meta’s attempts to claw back Ms. Wynn-Williams’s book will ultimately be successful. In 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the company’s board of directors said that it did not require employees “to remain silent about harassment or discrimination,” and that the company “strictly prohibits retaliation against any personnel” for speaking up on these issues.And in 2018, Meta said it would no longer force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration, following a similar stance taken by Google at the time.Sheera Frenkel More

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      Geoff Nicholson, Author of Darkly Comic Novels, Dies at 71

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      In more than a dozen books, he created characters who were obsessed with maps, urban walking, sexual fetishes and Volkswagen Beetles.Geoff Nicholson, whose darkly comic literary novels and eclectic nonfiction were full of characters defined by their obsessions — with cartography, Volkswagen Beetles, urban walking, jokes and sexual fetishes, many of which were enduring interests of Mr. Nicholson himself — died on Jan. 18 in Colchester, England, northeast of London. He was 71.His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”In novels with far-fetched plots, characters who often flirted with the cartoonish and stylized, noirish dialogue, Mr. Nicholson wrote with verve and biting wit, and he attracted a dedicated, if not large, readership for his prolific output.His Facebook profile once had a list of “liked” books whose first two titles were “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Big Sleep,” a thumbnail distillation of his own oeuvre of highbrow plundering of lowbrow culture.Mr. Nicholson was a verbal jokester, whether in ambitious fiction or in more prosaic writing. For the “About” page of his website, he annotated his own Wikipedia entry. In response to Wikipedia’s assertion that his work was “compared favorably” to that of Kingsley and Martin Amis, Will Self and Zadie Smith, Mr. Nicholson wrote, “I don’t recall anybody ever comparing me to Kingsley Amis, but I suppose they might have.”One person who did compare him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 review of Mr. Nicholson’s best-known novel, “Bleeding London.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Books From Other Shores

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      A memoir of Italy; notes on Canada.Mike Belleme for The New York TimesDear readers,I’m not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let’s say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the customs of neighboring and far-flung places.There are more and less benign versions of this roving impulse, but let’s not get into that either. Also, with due respect to hard-typing globetrotters, travel writing exhausts me. What I’m in the mood for is a scrappy, burrowing cosmopolitanism, books that dig down into the soil of a place and emerge with local dirt under their fingernails. Here are two of those, one a memoir of life in a foreign land, the other an extended excursion into an exotic literature.—A.O.“Images and Shadows: Part of a Life,” by Iris OrigoNonfiction, 1970Not long before he died, Origo’s father — an American diplomat married to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat — wrote that he wished his daughter to grow up “free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy.” He wanted her “to be a little ‘foreign,’ too, so that, when she grows up, she really will be free to love and marry anyone she likes, without its being difficult.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harper Lee’s Early Short Stories to Be Published for the First Time

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      Before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee had written short stories in which she explored some of its themes and characters.For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016.This fall, those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.Lee’s nephew, Edwin Conner, said that he and other members of her family were thrilled that the stories were preserved, and can now reach a wide audience. The estate decided to publish them in 2024, according to Harper.“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner said in a statement released by Harper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Books for Jazz Age Enthusiasts

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      A Scott and Zelda roman à clef; a photo collection of 1920s Paris.Museum of the City of New YorkDear readers,The Museum of the City of New York recently unveiled the refurbished Stettheimer Dollhouse, the decades-long creation of Carrie Stettheimer — who, with her sisters Florine (a painter) and Ettie (a writer), hosted notable salons for the 1920s avant-garde in their vast suite of apartments at a Midtown apartment building called Alwyn Court.I have been to see the house (“dollhouse” is almost a misnomer) a number of times since the museum brought it back on display, and have admired the miniature Marcel Duchamps and Gaston Lachaises as well as the fabulous interiors. It’s a true work of art in its own right. And it’s sent me down a rabbit hole.—Sadie“Parties: Scenes From Contemporary New York Life,” by Carl Van VechtenFiction, 1930Any discussion of the New York 1920s avant-garde must include Van Vechten — music critic, drama critic, photographer, novelist, Florine Stettheimer subject, and friend and editor to Gertrude Stein, among many, many other things. Van Vechten is frequently described as a champion of the Harlem Renaissance and is often credited with sparking interest among white bohemians (and bored socialites) with jazz and Black culture. For a full and nuanced portrait of his contradictory and wildly prolific life and career, I implore you to read his collected correspondence with Langston Hughes as well as Edward White’s excellent 2014 biography, “The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More