From an EGOT winner finally telling her own story to the man who introduced hip-hop to mainstream America, March’s reading list starts here.
‘Judy Blume: A Life’ by Mark Oppenheimer
Before Judy Blume, girls in books got the edited version of themselves. Mark Oppenheimer’s biography Judy Blume: A Life traces the woman behind the iconic persona — her unlikely path to publication, her turbulent personal life, and her decades-long fight against censorship on behalf of young readers. She was America’s most-banned author in the mid-1980s. The book arrives at a moment when those same battles over what kids are allowed to read are being refought in libraries and school boards across the country.
‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ by Juno Díaz
If you haven’t read Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the Goodman Theatre’s world-premiere English-language stage adaptation is the perfect reason to pick it up this month. The story of Oscar de León, a nerdy Dominican kid from New Jersey chasing love against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma and the Trujillo dictatorship, has never felt more urgent.
‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’ by Liza Minnelli with Michael Feinstein
Liza Minnelli turns 80 and is spilling the tea. Written with longtime collaborator Michael Feinstein, the memoir traces her life from daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli to EGOT-winning icon, through marriages, addiction, and her enduring commitment to human rights. What we’re most excited about? Her Studio 54 days and her marriage to Peter Allen.
‘Limelight’ by Andrew Keenan-Bolger
Author (and Broadway star) Andrew Keenan-Bolger drops a Staten Island kid into LaGuardia High School’s cutthroat performing arts world in 1996, a year when peep shows were giving way to Disney stores and queer New York was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic. Limelight is a coming-of-age story built on interviews Keenan-Bolger conducted with people who actually lived it. The theater kids need this one. So do the rest of us.
‘Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture’ by Fab 5 Freddy with Mark Rozzo
Fred Brathwaite (Fab 5 Freddy) is literally in the opening lines of Blondie’s “Rapture,” the song that carried hip-hop into mainstream America. But his new memoir covers far more ground: graffiti on New York City subway cars, the cult film Wild Style, Basquiat and Warhol, and his years as the original host of Yo! MTV Raps. At a time when the origins of hip-hop and street art are being absorbed into institutions and art galleries, Brathwaite lived it from the inside before any of it had a name. This memoir is his account of how it actually went down.
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