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 […]
If I love you and I duck it, I die. —James Baldwin JAMES BALDWIN FELL IN LOVE too easily, and we’re the victors feeding on the spoils of his dysfunctional longings as they mingle with his use of language in the service of divine justice. His private yearning and his public writing, like foils in […]
ALTHOUGH NONE OF HER BOOKS could be said to have happy endings, I have never until now thought of Chris Kraus as a writer of tragedies. As is the case with many of her admirers (and just as many of her detractors), my attention has long been snagged on her work’s thornier, more titillating qualities: […]
A MAN LOOKS OVER A FENCE, SPYING. He notes the arrival of a Buick hardtop convertible. Parked now, the driver rolls the top down, using a new automatic mechanism, exposing the interior leather to the elements right at the wrong moment. The camera at first shows a magnificent three, who spill out as from a […]
MEMOIR IS A SLIPPERY genre. Its name, from the French for “memories,” suggests a transparent fidelity, as if writing one required only transcription. In fact, every era produces its own forms of life writing, shaped by its particular cultural preoccupations and oversights. Today, for instance, most memoirs fall into two camps: first, the classic retrospective […]
THE UNCANNY fertility and invention displayed by the writing of Muriel Spark has been a consistent source of awed bemusement. Gabriel Josipovici, an experimental writer quick to identify Spark as a rare British predecessor, called her novels—she published twenty-two in all—“a joy to read and a nightmare to talk about.” Renata Adler, in the Spark […]
DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American […]
FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, THE EGYPTIAN ARTIST Inji Efflatoun divided her days in half. She would paint in the morning and do politics in the afternoon—anything from attending the events of a rich and varied cultural life to plunging headlong into activist campaigns. A member of several underground communist groups, Efflatoun created at least […]
THE ARTIST TINA GIROUARD (1946–2020) ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY from the rice farms of southwestern Louisiana in 1969, when she moved into a Chatham Square apartment that would serve as home, studio, and artist crash pad. Over the next decade, she would become an essential figure in an experimental downtown milieu defined by an […]
AH SATIE AGAIN! When Roger Shattuck wrote his The Banquet Years chapters dedicated to Satie back in 1955, he could still describe the enigmatic Parisian as “a musician more heard of than heard.” In the mid-1980s, when I read Shattuck’s portrait of the Belle Epoque demimonde, I distinctly remember thinking that Aldo Ciccolini’s Satie disks […]
