February house

'The most remarkable powerhouse of creative talent to come into being during the war years ... wonderfully readable and entertaining' Miranda Seymour, SUNDAY TIMES 'FEBRUARY HOUSE beautifully places the inhabitants rampant eccentricities within the intellectual and political context that shaped the art coming out of 7 Middagh [ ... ] As a social experiment, the house ultimately failed but it's legacy pays tribute to a time that puts its money where its mouth was in the belief in art as a force for social good' METRO 21/09 'A witty and entertaining account of an eccentrically elegant Brooklyn building and the glamorous writers who lived in it during the 1940s' SUNDAY TIMES 'You really must read' feature 11/09 'Tippins has a nice eye for the telling detail, the entertaining vignette and the lively juxtaposition' TLS September issue 'Sherill Tippin's highly original and entertaining piece of literary detective work unearths the creative, emotional and sexual struggles of this eccentric household ... Tippins expertly delineates the atmosphere of the house and the character of the residents ... she neatly interweaves a rich fund of anecdotes with an authoritative account of the creative cauldron from which, according to the writer Denis de Rougement, 'all that was new in America, in music, painting and choreography emanated', making the Brooklyn Group a less cohesive if more flamboyant rival to Bloomsbury' INDEPENDENT 30/09 'Take some of the greatest minds of their generation and put them all together in a ramshackle Brooklyn brownstone house at the start of WW2 and you have the artistic salon of the century ... They had some debauched parties, guzzled Benzadrine, laughed, argued, and created some of the best works of their careers. FEBRUARY HOUSE gives a warm, amusing and serious-minded account. You can almost smell the plaster crumbling from the walls' GAY TIMES/ September Issue 'The charm of February House is that the reader need have no prior knowledge of any of its cast. Tippins is a skilful, generous author and, as she folds together the various strands within her story, she brings us up to date with her characters' backgrounds, love affairs, tragedies and achievements. Insightful as well as entertaining ... Sherill Tippins weaves ... a glorious, spellbinding tale.' --Daily Mail 'This is a lovely book, full of funny stories and going at a cracking pace, as people move in and out , fall in love, have furious rows, take off their clothes, get drunk, have sex, and then cook a great big dinner for anybody who happens to be around. There is an enormous amount of nonsense talked by the people in the book; the nice thing about it is that you don't forget that the nonsense, in the end, was of an Olympian quality. The house itself, alas, is long knocked down. I can't imagine any creative moment more deserving of preservation as a museum' Philip Hensher, Telegraph 'As madhouses go, it makes the Big Brother house look like an old people's home' SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, FEATURE 11/9 'All credit is due to Sherill Tippins for having singled out this well-known episode in the lives of Auden, Britten and McCullers as a fascinating subject in its own right. Her synthesizing of the available material and thorough recreation of the historical background is excellent' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Witty and entertaining account of an eccentrically elegant Brooklyn building and the glamorous writers who lived in it during the 1940s' SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE 11/9 'Tippins resists the temptation to send up this coven of quarrelsome geniuses. While still having fun with them, she sets them vividly in the spirit of their time' THE TIMES 10/09 'What a terrific reality -- TV show the situation would have made: a gaggle of famous creative odds and sods -- Carson McCullers, W H Auden, Benjamin Britten, Paul Bowles, and to add spice, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee -- shacked up in a rickety old boarding house in New York' LITERARY REVIEW September Issue 'Tippins displays her gallery of grotesques with the skill of a ringmaster showing off performing fleas, and her affection for her subjects rises from the pages like the scent of joss sticks' BIG ISSUE 'If you love literary memoirs with an eye for the preposterous, try FEBRUARY HOUSE by Sherill Tippins; on the even of the Second World War, an old New York brownstone is filled with a disparate and dotty collection of young geniuses, and the masterpieces flow. Wonderful! Edwina Currie, NEW STATESMAN 28/11 'Tippins chronicle of how the housemates came together and why they went their separate ways defies the myth of the solitary artist: genius loves company just as much as misery does' FINANCIAL TIMES 'I've always wanted to write a history of that madhouse in Brooklyn when Auden, Britten, the Bowleses and Gypsy Rose Lee lived together, and Sherill Tippins THE FEBRUARY HOUSE was just as amusing as one had hoped' Nicholas Haslam, THE SPECTATOR 'Surely the most improbable live-in salon of the 20th century' Sunday Telegraph 30/7 'A genuinely arresting slice of literary history' Attitude Magazine, August 'It was a fertile chaos fuelled by alcohol and benzedrine, where two pianos - a grand for Britten, an upright for Bowles - were banging away on two different projects and the Bowleses could be heard through the wall screaming alarming things at each other ('I'll get you for this! You have ruined my uterus!' ). Tippins gives a warm and very wide-eyes account of the various goings on' Paperback Pick of The Week Sunday Times 7/8 Read more...