I’m off my Simone de Beauvoir kick for now — her letters to Sartre got a little depressing by the end — but I still read with interest this review of Transatlantic Liaison, the new play adaptation of her letters to Nelson Algren. Epistolary plays generally give me hives, but those letters display a screwy notion of the English idiom, and they could be strangely touching live.

The play sounds like it dabbles a little too freely in the facile opposition between feminist and lover, but I’d still see it, if only to hear someone ventriloquize the Beaver phrase “my beloved local youth.”