Bruce Handy

New York

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Author: "Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult." New picture books: "The Book from Far Away" and "What If One Day." Many bylines!

Articles

How Tina Fey Turned a Self-Help Manual for Anxious Mothers into "Mean Girls"

5 days ago | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

“Not every girl is miserable. There are actually genuinely happy girls. I don’t come across them very often, but they do exist.” —Rosalind Wiseman, in her best-selling nonfiction book, Queen Bees & Wannabes, 2002Mean Girls, released in 2004, is the first teen movie of the 21st century to earn an indisputable spot in the canon. For one thing, Tina Fey’s tart, smart screenplay is as witty and quotable as Clueless’s—to my taste the teen comedy gold standard—but with a genuinely nasty bite all its own.
James Gandolfini, "Sopranos" Star, Revisited in a New Biography by Jason Bailey

1 week ago | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend by Jason Bailey James Gandolfini would have been the first person to wonder why anyone would read a book about him, judging from a new biography, Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend. This was a performer whose sense of self-worth, depending on the day, ranged from unfeigned humility to desperate insecurity to full-on self-loathing.
Cinema Was Claude Lelouch’s Nanny

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

On a visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum the other day, the eighty-seven-year-old French director Claude Lelouch used the occasion to demonstrate his filmmaking technique.
"The Art of Endpapers," Explored at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

I can’t say when I first became obsessed with endpapers, but I know the exact moment I realized they could be the subject of a terrific exhibition. I was visiting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts, not long after Carle’s death, in 2021. A memorial retrospective included six of his glorious endpapers for books such as The Very Quiet Cricket and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?
Library Journal

3 weeks ago | libraryjournal.com | Bruce Handy

. May 2025. 384p. ISBN 9781501181177. $30. FILM COPY ISBN Teen movies seem ubiquitous, but every genre has its origins. Beginning with the Andy Hardy films of 1937–46, in which Mickey Rooney played the quintessential white American schoolboy, Handy’s ( Wild Things: The Joys of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult) book moves through 1950s juvenile-delinquency movies and James Dean as the ultimate misunderstood teen.
America Needs Cooties Now More Than Ever

4 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Bruce Handy

A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable disease began recently in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two girls, were sharing the elevator one day with a caretaker and a random adult (me). The boy was leaning against the back of the elevator, between the two girls. “Help! I’m in a girl sandwich,” he said.
R. Crumb Looks Back

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

The cartoonist Robert Crumb is described in a new biography as “misanthropic.” In his own work, he typically characterizes his personality as an unpleasant cocktail of rage, lust, and social ineptitude. But he was perfectly affable the other day, during a visit to the Whitney Museum. The occasion was a private viewing of prints and drawings, including a couple of his own that he hadn’t seen in decades.
Trump Won-Get Over It, Charlie Brown!

Dec 24, 2024 | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

Open on a tidy suburban street rendered melancholic by snowfall. Bouncy yet melancholic jazz piano plays. Charlie Brown and Linus rest their arms on a sturdy yet melancholic brick wall. CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. The election is over and the wrong people won, but I don’t feel the way I think I’m supposed to feel. Charlie Brown and Linus start walking. Snowflakes fall, gently yet also somehow . . .
"Kate Carew: The First Great Woman Cartoonist," by Eddie Campbell: Book Review

Dec 18, 2024 | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

You expect to find witty artwork in a book titled Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist, especially if the publisher is Fantagraphics, the gold standard when it comes to anthologizing classic comic strips. (The house is also a patron saint of contemporary graphic novels.) But as someone unfamiliar with Carew—like most everyone else alive today, I’d wager—I was not expecting a turn-of-the-past century Nora Ephron.
On the Block: Where Jerry Lewis and Buddy Hackett Once Schvitzed

Dec 1, 2024 | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

It was a drizzly November morning: perfect weather for picking over a carcass. The remains in question were the Jerry Lewis Monastery, as the Friars Club’s home on East Fifty-fifth Street is formally known. But with the club having defaulted, last year, on what was originally a thirteen-million-dollar mortgage, the six-story town house had gone into foreclosure and was now up for auction. A cluster of real-estate professionals and hospitality-industry types had gathered out front for a tour.