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 […]
IN 1999, AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE, ANTHONY BOURDAIN had all but given up hope that he would ever be recognized as a major talent in anything. For the man who would soon become famous for courting extremes, this mediocrity was a kind of torture. After a promising start at the Culinary Institute of America, […]
HOW CAN I NOT START WITH THE DICK PIC? Like many of its kind, its origin was practical: when Louise Bourgeois needed an updated portrait for the catalogue of her 1982 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Robert Mapplethorpe shot his iconic photograph of the seventy-year-old artist wearing a monkey-fur coat and clutching her phallic sculpture […]
IT’S LATE AUGUST AND I’M WALKING THROUGH THE PASSAGE DES PANORAMAS, the oldest covered arcade in Paris, simply because Lucien Chardon passes through it with Étienne Lousteau in Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions, the best novel ever written, which I finished shortly before arriving in the city. I’m carrying a copy of Splendeurs et misères […]
DEATH IS A LIVELIHOOD FOR THE GRAVEDIGGER. Death is alive. Death lives in Harlem. As Sun Ra expands in poem/song: death speaks to the negro, you are my servant. Photographer James Van Der Zee and poet Owen Dodson, guided by the vigilant curatorial eye of Camille Billops, collaborated to create a book documenting death in […]
WE’RE IN THE HOLYOKE MALL, and I need to go to the bathroom. Although the divorce is not so recent, some activities with my father still stretch him beyond his inclinations or means, usually both, which he devises to suit my older brother and me to make up for “it.” Shopping at the video-game store […]
IN “THE ART OF THE ESSAY,” Elizabeth Hardwick describes what makes good critical writing: “The mastery of expository prose, the rhythm of sentences, the pacing, the sudden flash of unexpected vocabulary, redeem polemic, and, in any case, no one is obliged to agree.” One encounters these qualities—and an intricate style that has been sadly sloughed […]
JULIA IOFFE’S Motherland is a book about Russian women written for American women. The book, which identifies itself as a feminist history of modern Russia, condemns American feminism for its toothlessness, its inability to see beyond the safety that has shielded America’s women from the ordinary horrors of Russian life. Ioffe was born and raised […]
CATHERINE BREILLAT HAS THE HOTS for Rhett Butler. The French novelist and film director mentions the conceited cad played by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939) no fewer than three times, always in the context of attraction, in I Only Believe in Myself, a book of interviews conducted by Murielle Joudet in 2022 […]
IN DECEMBER, A. S. Hamrah released two books: Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025, his second collection of movie criticism, and Last Week in End Times Cinema, which compiles a newsletter he wrote for a year beginning in the spring of 2024, chronicling the degradations of the film industry. This conversation took place at […]
LYDIA DAVIS INTRODUCED her brand of emotional vertigo in the mid-1980s, with short stories that could fairly be called flat but never cold. In her fiction and translation work—both lifelong gigs for her—Davis revises drafts heavily. Her patience has given us a catalogue of everyday American surrealism that is hers alone. Here is a story […]
LONG BEFORE ELON “I am become meme” Musk sought to dismantle the federal government under the aegis of a dog meme, there were LOLcats. Founded by two software developers in 2007, icanhascheezburger.com hosted an array of image macros, foraged from forums like Something Awful or created with an in-site tool, that paired a cute cat […]
