Heidi Pitlor, novelist and editor of The Best American Short Stories, presents her True Conversations series with the Mount, opening a season of writers.
Read articleA collage shows the first statewide Artweek festival in images
Get behind the scenes, get muddy, get up close to paper and paint and clay. ArtWeek crossed the state to the Berkshires in April and May 2018 with dozens of events, most of them free …
Read articleArtweek festival crosses Massachusetts and the Berkshires
The Germans called them the Night Witches. In World War II they flew planes made mostly of wood and canvas at night, without parachutes or radios. They were a Russian regiment, a few hundred women as young as 17. In 1941, the Soviet air force became the first in the […]
Read articleWeekend ahead June 30 to July 2
‘And there was distant music, simple and somehow sublime’ … and getting closer. This weekend, Ragtime takes Barrington Stage Company back to the turn of the 20th century, as a stifled housewife, an immigrant father and a musician from Harlem fight for their own real American dreams. It’s July in […]
Read articleNewly re-discovered Edith Wharton play comes to The Mount
Kate and John Derwent are newly married and in love, and she is warmly close to his 13-year-old daughter. After the early death of his first wife, they have slowly rebuilt a family. And their trust is about to face a radical test. Kate was the nurse who cared for […]
Read articleTaking a walk in Edith Wharton’s garden with outdoor sculpture — BTW column
The French lilac are blooming in wide arcs in the gardens at The Mount, at the end of the lime walk. Standing in the circle of bushes, I watched two swallowtail butterflies touch down for a drink. In the woods yellow iris still show in marshy places, and around the […]
Read articleWriters in residence in Wharton’s rooms
In the evening, they share a house in Lenox. They sit up late, talking and making pizza. They read each other’s work or watch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence. And each day they write at the Mount, in Edith Wharton’s inner rooms. Vanessa Manko said whatever she […]
Read articleCharles Coe and Michelle Gillett shared a picnic with poets
Charles Coe told it’s hard to think of a job that makes less money than poetry — “professional pick-up-sticks player,” he said, “or maybe running a ferret ranch in Montenegro.” He meant poets do what they love.
Read articleEdith Wharton gets into the trenches in World War I
The tunnel cut into the hill was wholly dark except for “an occasional narrow slit screened by branches.” The gunners had screens behind them, to keep any betraying light from showing where they sat with guns between their knees. Coming out into a “gutted house among fruit trees,” a woman […]
Read articleEdith Wharton invites writers home
In the bedroom, looking over the terrace to the lake, Claire McMillan traces the adventures of an artifact necklace from the 1920s. In the boudoir Yvonne Puig works out a careful balance between friendship and love. In the sewing room, Koren Zailckas careers through a thriller about a con artist, […]
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