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      Jhumpa Lahiri Declines Noguchi Museum Award Over Kaffiyeh Ban

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      The museum said the Pulitzer Prize-winning author withdrew her acceptance after it fired staff members for wearing clothing expressing political views.The Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri has declined to accept an award from the Noguchi Museum in Queens next month in disapproval of its new ban on political dress for its staff, which led to the firings of three employees who had worn kaffiyehs to signal solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” according to a statement emailed by the museum on Wednesday.“We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views,” the statement said of Ms. Lahiri. “We remain committed to our core mission of advancing the understanding and appreciation of Isamu Noguchi’s art and legacy while upholding our values of inclusivity and openness.”The museum, founded nearly 40 years ago by Noguchi, a Japanese American designer and sculptor, announced last month that during their working hours employees could not wear clothing or accessories that expressed “political messages, slogans or symbols.”The policy, which does not apply to visitors, was instituted after several staff members had, over a period of months, often worn kaffiyehs — scarves associated with Palestinians — for what one fired employee termed “cultural reasons.” The museum defended the prohibition earlier this month, saying in a statement that “such expressions can unintentionally alienate segments of our diverse visitorship.” A significant majority of staffers signed a petition opposing the rule.Lahiri and Lee Ufan, a Korean-born minimalist painter, sculptor and poet, were to have received the Isamu Noguchi Award at the museum’s fall benefit gala next month. Ufan could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, but is still scheduled to receive the award, the museum said.Lahiri, who was born in London, won the 2000 Pulitzer for fiction for her debut, the story collection “Interpreter of Maladies,” and has since published several books of fiction and nonfiction in both English and Italian. She is also the director of the creative writing program at Barnard College. Through her literary agent, Lahiri declined to comment.Questions of how to express solidarity with Israelis or Palestinians have divided cultural institutions since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 of last year, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip has killed more than 41,000 people, according to the local health authorities.Lahiri was one of thousands of scholars who signed a letter to university presidents in May expressing solidarity with campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, calling it “unspeakable destruction.”The museum’s budget is supported by royalties from furniture and lighting designs by Noguchi, who died in 1988. The staff petition alludes to his voluntary internment in an Arizona detention camp for Japanese Americans during World War II in an effort to improve conditions there. More

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      Elias Khoury, Master of the Modern Arabic Novel, Dies at 76

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      In his fiction and journalism, he sought to illustrate the story of the contemporary Middle East and his native Lebanon.Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer whose sweeping, intricately rendered tales of postwar life in the Middle East won him praise as one of the greatest modern Arabic novelists, and whose editorial leadership of some of Lebanon’s leading publications made him an arbiter of his country’s turbulent political culture, died on Sunday in Beirut. He was 76.His daughter, Abla Khoury, confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that her father had been in declining health for several months.Mr. Khoury’s writing, both fiction and journalism, often focused on the twin events that defined his world: the Lebanese civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the plight of Palestinians after the founding of Israel, particularly the tens of thousands who fled to Lebanon in 1948 and after the Six-Day War of 1967.As a novelist, Mr. Khoury was often compared with the American writer James A. Michener, who in books like “Hawaii” (1959) and “Texas” (1985) attempted to capture epic swaths of history in an intimate narrative.But if his vision was Michenerian, his prose was Faulknerian, driven by interweaving, stream-of-conscious narratives. He also claimed Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino as influences.Mr. Khoury in 2014. His novels often began with a single, sustained encounter before spinning outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders.Bilal Hussein/Associated PressWe 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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      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”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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      Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90

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      She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published works by their literary friends. After he left her and became Amiri Baraka, she found her own voice.Hettie Jones, a poet and author who with her husband, LeRoi Jones (who later became the incendiary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka), made her household a hub for Beat writers and other artists — but who was often described as a footnote in the rise of her famous spouse as “the white wife” he disavowed — died on Aug. 13 in Philadelphia. She was 90.Her daughter Kellie Jones confirmed the death.Raised in a conventional middle-class Jewish household in Queens, Ms. Jones was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity. She dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University, where she was studying drama, to work at The Record Changer, a jazz magazine, for $1 an hour. There she met a charismatic young poet named LeRoi Jones, and they fell in love.They hung out at the Five Spot on Cooper Square, listening to jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk. Though they were the rare mixed-race couple in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, theirs was a mostly colorblind world, Ms. Jones thought — until it wasn’t.She recalled the day they were walking together and heard jeers and racial slurs from behind. She wheeled around to protest, but Mr. Jones held her back.Ms. Jones in the 1960s. She was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity despite her conventional upbringing.via Jones familyThe situation was more dangerous for him, she realized, struck by her own naïveté and ignorance. (At the time, more than half the country had laws criminalizing interracial marriage.) She also realized, as she later wrote, that “to live like this I would have to defer to his judgment.”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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      Edna O’Brien: An Appreciation

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      Decades before Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the Irish writer Edna O’Brien — who died at 93 on July 27 — provided her own searing portraits of an oppressive, violent society seen through the prism of female friendship.When we first meet them in 1960’s “The Country Girls,” Kate and Baba are teenagers, dreaming of a future beyond the confines of their rural Irish village and strict convent school. Its sequels — “Girl With Green Eyes” (1962), and the ironically-titled “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964) — follow them through their first taste of womanhood in Dublin, then to London, where they struggle to reconcile their romantic fantasies with the frustrations of real marital life.O’Brien was 29 when “The Country Girls” was published, living with two young sons and her then-husband, the writer Ernest Gébler, in a small house in a bleak south London suburb to which they’d moved, two years earlier, from Ireland. The novel took her only three weeks to write, the words having “tumbled out,” as she recalled in her 2012 memoir, “Country Girl,” “like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.”Although tame by today’s social mores, and praised on its publication by the English press, “The Country Girls” — with its candid portrayal of female sexuality and extramarital romance — sent shock waves through Ireland, where it was denounced by the church and banned by the Irish censorship board as “indecent.” Copies were even publicly burned.Overnight, O’Brien became Ireland’s most notorious exiled daughter, and its foremost chronicler of female experience. “No writer in English is so good at putting the reader inside the skin of a woman,” praised The Evening Standard of her fourth novel, “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a divorced mother aflame with desire. She “gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women,” declared the novelist Eimear McBride.O’Brien’s Ireland is “a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women,” as she describes it in her short story “A Scandalous Woman.” She describes how paternal violence — sanctioned by the misogynistic power of the Catholic Church — is woven into the fabric of life. Violence against women is an ordinary, everyday occurrence, as is their propensity to be punished for their sins.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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      Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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      She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe 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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      Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89

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      Celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, he also contributed (though without credit) to the scripts of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.”Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Towne’s Academy Award was part of a phenomenal run. He was nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row; his “Chinatown” win, in 1974, came between nominations for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” both directed by Hal Ashby. He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).He was widely regarded as a master at writing dialogue, though he was less gifted at meeting deadlines — he was notorious for delivering long, unshapely scripts way past their due dates. The film historian David Thomson called him “a fascinating contradiction: in many ways idealistic, sentimental and very talented; in others a devout compromiser, a delayer, so insecure that he can sometimes seem devious.”Mr. Towne speaking at the Writers Guild Awards in Los Angeles in 2016.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images North AmericaMr. Towne later directed a few movies, and occasionally appeared onscreen, but he left his most lasting mark as a writer. And although he remained active into the 21st century, his reputation is based largely on the work he did in the 1970s.Beginning in the late 1960s with cutting-edge movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” and running through “Raging Bull” in 1980, the New Hollywood was a pinnacle for American directors, who followed the French auteur model of making idiosyncratic, personal movies, and also for talented screenwriters like Mr. Towne and a small army of gifted actors, like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, who did not fit the old Hollywood mold.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