The scariest of all scary clowns is back. A mini-series prequel to the 2017 and 2019 movies based on Stephen King’s novel It turns the clock back to 1962, when terror spreads through a quaint Maine town as children begin disappearing. Bill Skarsgard reprises his role as the sewer-dwelling, shape-shifting Pennywise the Dancing Clown, fueling an origin story that’s sure to keep viewers far away from any storm drains. Sunday, Oct. 26, at 9 p.m., HBO and HBO Max.

by Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade’s latest book “can be read as a biographical detective story that fills in once-taboo blanks,” said Diane Cole in the Financial Times. Though Wade’s subject, Gertrude Stein, has not exactly been an inscrutable mystery, newly available archives have revealed more about why the modernist figurehead fled the U.S. for Europe in 1902, why she wrote the memoir that finally earned her a wide audience, and how her relationship with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, sustained her through much of her life. Beyond that, Wade’s work could serve as “a wish-fulfilling literary fairy tale for the always fame-hungry Stein”—because it details how Stein came to be recognized as a literary innovator posthumously and mounts its own précis for Stein’s brilliance.

Nearly 80 years after Stein’s death, “her celebrity is incontestable; her status as a genius less so,” said Christopher Benfey in The New York Times. “Critics barely out of swaddling clothes proclaim Stein unreadable,” but “she can’t be erased from literary history,” because of the influence she had on heirs ranging from Ernest Hemingway to poet John Ashbery. Wade devotes the “vivid” first half of her book to a straight account of Stein’s life, said Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1874, Stein was raised in Oakland and came within a semester of earning a medical degree at Johns Hopkins before she bolted, joining her brother Leo first in London, then Paris. The siblings began buying paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse, building a collection that helped turn their large apartment into a hot spot for forward-looking artists and writers, who viewed Stein as an oracle. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a publisher for her avant-garde fiction, particularly The Making of Americans, a plotless 900-page work that was completed in 1911 but not published until 1925, after James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even compared with Joyce’s, Stein’s modernism was radical. “Her ambition was to deprogram and rewire a reader’s brain.” 

In a welcome turn, the second half of Wade’s “breezily readable” book “complicates all that we’ve learned in part one,” said Jacquelyn Ardam in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Focusing on details that Toklas revealed after Stein’s death, it attributes Stein’s early career change in part to the wrenching effects of a lesbian love triangle and frames Stein’s cheekily titled 1933 memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a bid to repair the couple’s relationship. Meanwhile, although Wade’s positive view of Stein’s fiction won’t persuade all of its many detractors, said Ryan Ruby in Bookforum, the curious should give it a chance. “More than any other writer, Stein invented high modernism,” and Wade’s biography “makes a convincing case that her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”

The screen icon who ignored conventions

Diane Keaton’s natural acting style and idiosyncratic fashion sense upended Hollywood’s clichés of movie-star glamour. Her best roles highlighted her quirky charm or her passionate intensity, and she could bounce between self-deprecation and easy self-confidence. A widely acclaimed actress, she earned an Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) as well as nominations for Reds (1981), Marvin’s Room (1996), and Something’s Gotta Give (2003). She made just as indelible a mark on the culture through her menswear-inspired style. Keaton lived in hats and ties, never baring much skin, and even accepted her Oscar wearing two skirts, a tie over a white shirt, and socks with her heels. In career, appearance, and personal life, she defied cultural norms. “It’s an unconventional life, it’s true,” she often said. “I just worked my way into the life that I have because I had a goal and it was very simple: I wanted to be in the movies.”

Born Diane Hall in Los Angeles, she dropped out of community college at 19 to study acting in New York and adopted her mother’s maiden name. At 25, she made her Broadway debut in 1968’s Hair, but refused to appear nude in the final scene. Her next job, Allen’s 1969 play Play It Again, Sam, launched a relationship with the director—they would date for three years—and earned her a Tony nomination. But “a film career was always Keaton’s goal,” said The New York Times, and she appeared in her first movie, Lovers and Other Strangers, in 1970. She remained close with Allen, starring in many of his films and defending him against the accusation that he molested his daughter Dylan. “In acting terms, Keaton proved that a woman could have it all,” said The Guardian, excelling in classic dramas like The Godfather series and beloved comedies like The First Wives Club (1996) and Father of the Bride (1991).

Always stubbornly herself, Keaton “came to define the modern, independent woman for a generation with their own incomes, opinions, and neuroses,” said The Times (U.K.). While she dated Warren Beatty and spent years with Al Pacino, she never married, but in her 50s adopted two kids. She began directing in 1987 and later took up writing, publishing over a dozen books on everything from architecture to fashion. “Getting older hasn’t made me wiser,” she said in 2019. “I don’t know anything, and I haven’t learned.”