ANITA BROOKNER PUBLISHED HER FIRST NOVEL, A Start in Life (the author’s title, used in the UK, was The Debut), in 1981. She was fifty-three years old. Hilary Mantel’s assessment was that Brookner “seemed to have arrived perfectly formed, as if she had hatched from a marble egg.” Over the ensuing twenty-eight years, Brookner would […]
IN JANUARY 1961 Bill Wilson wrote a letter to Carl Jung expressing his gratitude to the Swiss psychotherapist for his indirect influence on the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson reminded Jung of a former patient, a friend of a friend, whom Jung had advised some thirty years prior that to treat his need for alcohol […]
How do you explain the generational trend where a third of the people you know from undergrad, even the ones who would’ve been dismissive of such a thing in a different era, are becoming therapists? Perhaps it’s because there are no jobs in the arts or humanities. Or maybe it’s because we are so collectively […]
IN HER 1964 ESSAY “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag famously complained that “the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling . . . the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.” She concluded with the influential rallying cry: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Et voila, the work of […]
“IN GENEVA, IN 2017, when I first saw the pile of letters to John from Lorraine Gill, I wanted to believe their relationship couldn’t have been that significant or consequential,” writes Tom Overton in John Berger: From Life. “A confused sense of loyalty made me want Anya’s life to be less complicated, less painful,” he […]
IN JUNE 1964, Peter Bogdanovich and his wife, all-purpose helpmate, and eventual creative partner, Polly Platt, left New York City and took a three-bedroom house with a yard in the San Fernando Valley, not far from the Van Nuys Airport. The idea was to get into the movie business. Then twenty-four, Bogdanovich had directed some […]
Watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, I too want to go home. Like all Nolan’s films, it is dour, hammy, and too long, with dialogue from a tin can. “The gods help those who help themselves,” Matt Damon as Odysseus says. Ah, the pure serene. Homer’s man of twists and turns is unrecognizable in […]
AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS MAY NOT be objective, but that does not mean they are subjective either. To be sure, they are always made by specific persons, and are in this sense personal, yet this fact is often taken to be the end of the argument, when it ought to be the beginning of analysis. What goes […]
IN NINTH STREET WOMEN, her landmark group biography of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Gabriel insists that the power brokers of the mid-century New York avant-garde worked to refashion art as a macho enterprise. Until then, male artists in America were thought to be rather suspect: “elitist” […]
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 […]
