Read it here. In our cover story, Moira Donegan considers the life and work of the late painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. Hermione Hoby looks at the incredible run of lacerating novels produced by Gwendoline Riley. Sarah Nicole Prickett posits what we can learn from William H. Gass’s hatred-ridden anti-novel The Tunnel. Haley Mlotek explores the mother-daughter […]
PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW the teachings of Wittgenstein, whether or not they do so wittingly, find nothing more frightening—or more potentiating—than a state of wordlessness: the end of the world. We can see this clearly in the time of live-streamed genocide, when the avowal that “there are no words” is often what passes for attunement to […]
EVERY WOMAN is a daughter. We begin our lives in lineage, understanding that our lives are possible only because of our mothers’ life, and that our first attachment will eventually be our first act of separation. There are many ways to understand being a woman—even more ways to misunderstand her—and then here with the label […]
ALL LITERARY AGENTS are liars. I am a literary agent. A paradox both animates and undermines Laura B. McGrath’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, her attempt to execute the most complete portrait yet of our profession and its undersung role in literary history. While she draws upon stray papers in disparate […]
TWO YEARS into writing The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson realized that he had veered off course. The book, Thomson’s second after Movie Man (1967), was commissioned in 1971 as a simple encyclopedia on modern cinema. By 1973 he had written close to 500,000 words on cinema’s central figures—actors, directors, and producers. His […]
SEAN HOTCHKISS’S HATING WOMEN IS A THOROUGHLY MISNAMED BOOK. Though the title suggests the dark confessions of a reformed Andrew Tate–like figure, the work contains no acts of women-hating, nor does it truly grapple with “male rage,” a feat that would require confrontation with the terrifying reality of male violence. Instead, Hating Women is a […]
CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER KEPT ODD HOURS. Before she died in April, Dupuy-Spencer, a prominent painter—commercially successful, critically acclaimed, and about as famous as a contemporary artist gets—was habitually nocturnal. “Even at the best of times,” her father, the novelist Scott Spencer, told me, “she would go into the studio at three or four in the afternoon, […]
SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THERE ARE THREE TRUE OUTCOMES FOR MILITANTS. You run, you’re imprisoned, or you die. Sometimes it’s all three. The Weather Underground (WU), perhaps the most notorious of the late-1960s American radicals, met all these fates—including, most famously, accidentally blowing up three of their own. Born locally out of the violent splits […]
My introduction to the original edition of Flyboy in the Buttermilk came not long out of college, when I moved into a scuzzy rooming house in downtown Toronto with the student-journalism compadre who’d also go to punk and jazz shows with me. The first day, I was semi-competitively eyeballing Doug’s bookshelves, as you do when […]
THREE HUNDRED and twenty-three pages into Lonesome Dove, the eight-hundred-and-fifty-eight-page Western epic that propelled Larry McMurtry to a level of literary celebrity that’s hard to imagine today, his two principal characters ride into San Antonio for the first time in many years. The era is the late 1870s, the twilight of the American frontier. The […]
TOWARD THE END of his life, Edward Said liked to call himself the last Jewish intellectual. It is an excellent and, I’m tempted to say, quintessentially Jewish joke. I have thought of it often since October 7, 2023, as I’ve watched the unfolding of the most intense and urgent propaganda war over the question of […]
Before death there is life; before life there is sex. Propiedad Privada, a new photo monograph by Reynaldo Rivera, spans four decades of lust and loss with an unseen collection of intimate photographs. Twelve texts from writers including Constance Debré, Brontez Purnell, Abdellah Taïa, and Justin Torres expand Rivera’s photographic world, arguing, through personal narratives, […]
SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially toward the end of her life, she never made it to set at all. Monroe is famous for her mix of irrepressible sexuality and childlike innocence, but those who knew her […]
EMILY LABARGE’S DOG DAYS IS A MEMOIR, OF SORTS, about the author and her family surviving an armed home invasion in 2009, and her writerly bid, having survived, to translate unutterable events into language. The book opens not on its precipitating scene of violence but with a planned reenactment of the traumatized body’s physical positioning […]
TAKE IT FROM ME—IT TAKES GUTS to commit serious analysis of the Kardashians to the page. In a decade-plus of working full-time as a critic, I have mercifully not received much hate mail, except in the wake of an essay I once published about Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which drove one man in particular […]
MY MOTHER INTRODUCED ME TO LANGSTON HUGHES the way I imagine many Black mothers have introduced Black sons to Langston Hughes for decades, if not a whole century: when I became a teenager, she made me read his poem “Mother to Son.” “Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal […]
I CRY EVERY TIME I FINISH SULA. This is not due to any lack of acquaintance with the novel’s tragic ending. Toni Morrison’s second published work of fiction was assigned reading in several courses I took during my studies. I have taught Sula at least once a year for the past ten years. On vacations, […]
FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN TURNED FORTY-NINE WHILE HIDING FROM THE FBI IN THE SPRING OF 1970, though pictures from that time suggest the playfulness of a younger man. In shots taken by civil rights movement photographer Bob Fitch, Berrigan mugs at the camera from under a rat’s-nest wig and sombrero, a lampoon of disguise. Beanie-clad, he […]
IT’S NOT SAID often enough, if it’s said at all, that avant-garde American poetry is experiencing a renaissance—an overbroad, obnoxious term that nonetheless fits the scale of the moment. For the early part of the twenty-first century, unless you really paid attention to the little magazines and small presses or, later, to Tumblr, you might […]
WHEN A WRITER undertakes a tribute to a pop star, where does the fan end and the critic begin? Can (or should) those roles be separated? In Stephanie Burt’s Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift, it’s clear that the author is writing about one of the great, defining loves of her […]
