Like her life of Sexton, Ms. Middlebrook's other biographies centered on lives suffused with sexual yearning, inner turmoil and the creative drive.
But centered on lives badly balanced on the ragged edge of survival and uprooted by poverty, with a distant war rumbling in the background, inaudible to some people, deafening to others, this is a novel that could easily have been set in the present.
"Girls want to do something a little cheeky," said Samara Hodgson, an owner with Fleur Childs of the Artful Bachelorette, the year-old company that organized the event (and also does bachelor parties, birthdays and assorted get-togethers centering on live nude figure drawing, averaging one party weekly).
The show, which centered on the lives of four close-knit Italian sisters living in Brooklyn, was heavily hyped due to being created by former Sex and the City writer Liz Tuccillo and exec produced by Marta Kauffman, who co-created Friends.
It's a commonplace to consider the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman's films to be centered on the lives of institutions and those of the Maysleses to be centered on the lives of people, but "Gimme Shelter" does both.
Mr. Springer's first Broadway production, "No Place to Be Somebody," centered on the lives of black denizens of a rough-and-tumble New York saloon, a milieu rarely explored by mainstream theater of the period.
This year happens to be one in which some unusually excellent films and artists have gotten nominations — and in which, for a welcome and long-overdue change, some of those films are centered on the lives of black people and some of those major artists are black.
Though the book and movie were centered on the lives of African Americans, the audience for both transcended ethnic boundaries.
The date "also symbolizes the incredible volition and power of the people of Ferguson and the birthing of another movement centered on Black lives," Robinson said.
Since the release of her 1988 collection Bad Behavior, stories centered on the lives of sex workers, sadomasochists and victims of off-kilter power dynamics, she's earned a reputation as raw and enterprising.
In a photo project titled "City of the Dead," centered on the lives of Egyptians in a Cairo neighborhood called Bab al-Nasr (in Arabic, "gates of victory"), Hadi documents hundreds of families who for the past 60 years have been living among the graves of their ancestors.
