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Exiled in Paradise one of Donna Rifkind’s “Five Best” Wall Street Journal, Feb 2020 What It Was Like to Be at Aretha Franklin’s First NYC Performance Billboard, Aug 2018 Read Anthony’s The Number That No Man Could Number in February 2017 Harper’s and his coda The Old Prejudices in Harper’s March 21, 2017 Blog |
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The Fan Who Knew Too Much
The Secret Closets of American Culture
pages in this book. Heilbut ranges over the culture like a madman, but with a fierce sanity in his eye, debunking myths and erecting new ones. I finished The Fan Who Knew Too Much wondering how, without it, I’d ever thought I understood a thing about America in the 20th century.”  — John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
“Take in his witty, passionate prose, his uncanny blend of scholarship and reportage, his analytic brilliance and his joie de vivre. You will be stirred and delighted.” — Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System
“One of the most important and ingenious books of cultural criticism I’ve ever read. The first essay fairly brims with the remarkable energy of great scholarship, yoking ideas and making connections; the second is arguably the best and most informed thing I’ve ever read about Aretha. As fun to read, and think about, as it is profound.” — Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
“My kinda brain food.” — James Wolcott
“Leapt off the shelf and refused to be put down . . . Everything I know about gospel music I’ve learned from Anthony Heilbut’s compilations and writings; thanks to his crazy compendium The Fan Who Knew Too Much, he has now, also, taught me everything I know about radio soap operas, Aretha Franklin, and homosexuality in the black church.” — Lorin Stein, The Paris Review Full Review [PDF]
“Anthony Heilbut has been a guide and a mentor to me. I know of no one who has the love and depth of knowledge of this extraordinary author.” — Paul Simon
“A remarkably bold and original examination of American culture, filled with passion, insight and scholarship. An essential work.” — Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash: The Life
“The intellectual command and all-over-the-place critical nimbleness on display in these essays are dazzling — they range from a minibiography of Aretha Franklin to a reflection on the high-pitched male voice in both pop and classical music to a celebration of the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth — but it is a nearly 100-page piece driven by ethical and political urgency that anchors the collection.’” — Eric Banks, The Chicago TribuneFull Review [PDF]
“At the book’s heart, alongside the title essay, is the extended meditation on Aretha Franklin . . . the most incisive and illuminating portrait yet drawn . . . as well as a soul-searching exposé on the outing of gays in the black church. These essays allow Mr. Heilbut to deploy a confessional mode that suits his elegy for a dying American art . . . [a] most profound study.” — Eddie Dean, The Wall Street Journal Full Review [PDF]
“[Heilbut] comes at his subjects quietly and humanely, with no agenda other than to understand . . . There aren’t many fans like Heilbut, with his cataloguing ardor, his teeming frame of reference and his thirst for experience . . . Without breaking a sweat, he swings from the plight of modern academia to the enduring values of the daytime radio serial. He drops in on old favorites such as Einstein and Hannah Arendt. Throwing them all into a single volume, he gives us the thread to bind them.” — Louis Bayard, The Washington PostFull Review [PDF]
“Surprising and deeply moving . . . Rousing and impassioned . . . Heilbut’s various obsessions are weaved through this deeply personal collection, giving it the charismatic stamp of a single man and a single mind.” — Ian Crouch, The Boston Globe Full Review [PDF]
“Heilbut’s insights, new to me, make Somebody Else’s Paradise an intriguing essay on many levels—i.e., androgyny as an émigré contribution, Brecht’s career prompting the speculation that dialectics means never having to say you’re sorry, the Joseph tetralogy as a huge novel about storytelling . . . Oh, and Palmer, Dietrich, and Lamarr having nothing in common with Arendt except for being smarter than anyone expected them to be — which, in some ways, is a great deal, etc. But what impresses most is that he covers so much ground, packs in so much information, offer nuanced judgments, AND tells jokes, all the while making it look effortless.” — Tess Lewis, PEN Award-Winning Translator
“Heilbut gives gospel music back its gayness . . . Throughout the book, across art forms, he argues that the heart is with those who have been turned out; that the center of a community and an art are in fact not at the center, but at the margin. . . . Heilbut’s generous book demonstrates that no fan can know too much, or love too much.” — Noah Berlatsky, Slate Full Review [PDF]
“He knows the score and tells it in a style by turns tragic, bawdy, transporting, and balefully beautiful . . . With The Fan Heilbut turns his haunted fascination into a meditative reckoning with the struggle to ‘get over’ for all those who are exiled among their own people.” — Douglas Harrison, The Gay and Lesbian ReviewFull Review [PDF]
“Nimble, expansive and conveyed with delightful panache . . . Heilbut’s work has long been distinguished by his gift for taking on polysemous topics and spinning the reader through them, gracefully and compellingly — teasing out all sorts of unexpected associations along the way. It’s a pleasure to read intellectual history where the frame of reference is so unabashedly broad and the weave of ideas so rewarding to follow . . . It’s an irresistible ride and full of discoveries.” — George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile Full Review [PDF]
“Impeccably researched . . . Heilbut’s propensity for tangents and parenthetical observations occurs as a worthwhile, even endearing exercise, the mark of an author who is unabashedly passionate about his subject. He writes luminously about Thomas Mann . . . and, most touchingly, the brilliant but troubled writer Joseph Roth. Perhaps the most successful essay is its last, in which the author reveals himself as a music fan of epic proportions.” — Iris McLister, Santa Fe New MexicanFull Review [PDF]
“Marvelously zesty, erotically frank, assumption-blasting essays . . . take us on a guided tour unlike any other through the spirals of the psyche.” — Donna Seaman, BooklistFull Review [PDF]
“The Fan Who Knew Too Much feels like a late Beethoven string quartet, drawing on a rich career’s obsessions and paying tribute to sources of inspiration.” — Jimmy So, The Daily BeastFull Review [PDF]
“Majestic . . .The Fan Who Knew Too Much is one of the best collections of essays to appear in many years. It is written with depth, clarity, sensitivity, wit and lyricism. It is Heilbut at his masterful and literary best.” — Wallace Best, The Huffington PostFull Article [PDF]
“A brilliant, one-of-a-kind and immensely challenging book by a brilliant, one-of-a-kind, immensely challenging American writer.” — Jeff Simon, The Buffalo NewsFull Review [PDF]
— See Books for More Reviews —
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Now in Paperback 
Purchase Here M O R E P R A I S E John Cameron Mitchell Q. The last great books you’ve read? A. Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut Ann Powers “Buy it just for the Aretha chapter, it really will change your life.” I N T E R V I E W S Broadcast PBS American Masters: Sister Rosetta Tharpe February 22, 2013 Sirius Michelangelo Signorile Show August 20, 2012 Sirius Bob Edwards Show August 20, 2012 WCCO Mischke Til Midnight July 23, 2012 WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show July 9, 2012 WBAI Cat Radio Cafe June 25, 2012 BBC The World Today June 4, 2012 Published Washington Blade Life-long ‘Fan’ November 15, 2012 Gay City News Gay Wind Beneath Gospel’s Wings August 29, 2012 The Record — Music News from NPR Gospel’s Secrets Come into the Light August 6, 2012 Religion Dispatches The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives July 30, 2012 V I D E O Rutgers University The Gospel Sound at 50 A Conversation with Anthony Heilbut December 13, 2021 PBS The Black Church This is our Story. This is our Song. February 17, 2021 “The Mississippi Whoop” cf. The Paris Review [2-24-17] |
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