‘Hapless children’ wander the Edward Gorey House
Original pen-and-ink drawings are a revelation in detail
Barbara Clark
Since the death of famed author/illustrator Edward Gorey in 2000, the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port has become a popular destination for visitors to Cape Cod, holding annual exhibits and events that spotlight the late artist’s prodigious talents.
The museum opens its 2021 season on Thursday, April 8 with “Hapless Children: Drawings from Mr. Gorey’s Neighborhood,” an exhibit that the Gorey website calls “a romp through a number of ill-fated childhoods,” featuring his unique artwork and ingenious tales of childhood gone wrong.
This article is more than 1 month old
From the birds in the trees to the fresh flowers laid on headstones, graveyards sustain life in surprising and touching ways
Touchingly alive . St Mary’s graveyard, Whitby. Photograph: daverhead/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Touchingly alive . St Mary’s graveyard, Whitby. Photograph: daverhead/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Mon 1 Mar 2021 09.43 EST
Last modified on Tue 2 Mar 2021 05.12 EST
Walking fatigue is everywhere. It is the idea of it, rather than the actual one-foot-in-front-of-another business. Much as I have enjoyed watching my usual route behind the dump and along the cycle path evolve from frozen to liquid mud, spotting the first nitrous oxide cartridges of the year blooming in the undergrowth, I am officially mad with boredom. It has been six months since the exhilarating time someone set fire to a sofa along this route and my sluggish synapses need stimulation.
Julie Phillips
“S is for Susan who perished of fits”: Mark Dery offers the first major biography of Edward Gorey.
Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
, by Mark Dery, Little, Brown, 503 pages, $35
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By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual. His enigmatic illustrations of equally fur-coated and Firbankian men in parlors, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed, doomed children (in
The Gashlycrumb Tinies, among other works) share his own gothic camp aesthetic. Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the culture, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?
Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales
Adèle Barclay
Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales shreds the yellow ribbons of childhood sentimentality and, instead, offers an exploration of what it feels like to be small and vulnerable in a stormy world.
I’m not nostalgic for childhood. Childhood was terrifying the lack of agency, the grownup world’s opaque set of rules, the playground’s ferocious pecking order, the fear of real and imaginary things. And so I’m grateful that Shirley Camia’s
Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales shreds the yellow ribbons of childhood sentimentality and, instead, offers an exploration of what it feels like to be small and vulnerable in a stormy world.