WRITERS
ALEX ROSS, LOUIS BAYARD & KATE BORNSTEIN
Here's what Alex Ross (left) has done during the past year or so: picked up a National Book Critics Circle Award for his history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise, continued writing his blog of the same name along with music criticism for The New Yorker, won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Talent must attract talent: His husband of three years, Jonathan Lisecki, is an award-winning film director and actor.The historical fiction specialist Louis Bayard (center) took readers to an imagined world of young Edgar Allan Poe in 2006's The Pale Blue Eye and Tiny Tim as a grown man in Mr. Timothy, on The New York Times' Notable Book list in 2003. In this year's Black Tower, his latest detective (based on real-life Parisian policeman Eugène François Vidocq, considered the first modern detective) aims to discover the fate of Louis-Charles, who as the son of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI may or may not have died in solitary confinement at the age of 10. When not writing national best sellers, Bayard is a staff writer at Salon.com.
It's a long way from a log cabin in Fargo, N.D., to life in New York City as a transgender writer, performance artist, and activist. Kate Bornstein's (below, right) Blog for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws gives a glimpse of her wide-ranging interests, but for anyone who blanches at the "outlaw" theme that runs through much of her work, Bornstein is a humanist in the deepest sense. "Homophobia is only one of about a dozen intersecting systems of oppression that are keeping the majority of people in the world at each other's throats," she says. "I want to build bridges with activists across the outlawed outer edges of the world's cultures."
