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 […]
“A SALESMAN HAS TO SEE PEOPLE AS THEY ARE,” says the protagonist of Helen DeWitt’s 2011 novel, Lightning Rods, a satire about a failed door-to-door salesman who invents a business model that winds up reordering the modern workplace. “No matter how badly people want something,” he explains, “if they don’t want to be the kind […]
SELF-PROCLAIMED “DEADBEAT NEW YORK RESTAURATEUR” Keith McNally is not a man at peace with himself. This assessment requires no great leap of interpretation, given that his memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, opens with his 2018 suicide attempt. In McNally’s telling, he had been on top of the world just two years prior: happily married and […]
THE VISIONARY PAINTER, SCULPTOR, AND INVENTOR JACK WHITTEN (1939–2018) moved to New York City from Alabama in 1960. He later explained that, as a Black civil rights activist in Jim Crow country, staying put was not an option: “I knew that if I stayed in the South, somebody was gonna kill me or I was […]
SINCE LEAVING ANTIGUA FOR THE UNITED STATES in 1965, at the age of sixteen, Jamaica Kincaid has written fiction, essays, and memoirs that mull over her inheritance as the reluctant daughter of the British empire. She is best known for her slim novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990), about a rebellious girl growing up […]
SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur. The product’s package—a […]
Before dawn on January 9, 1800, a young boy emerged from the bare winter forests that surrounded a small village in southern France. A local caught him pulling out vegetables from a terraced back garden, naked except for the tatters of what was once a shirt. He was hungry, dirty, self-assured, and silent. The thick […]
POET AND LITERARY CRITIC Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot: A Life is a destabilizing achievement of radical self-exposure, interrogation of form, and defiance of reader expectation. Setting out to capture what it’s like to live through sexual violence and its aftershocks, the memoir records all the pain, the horror, the numbness; the forgetting and remembering and […]
The Summer 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay exploring Geoff Dyer’s new artistic territory, Brandon Taylor’s exploration of Ocean Vuong’s fictional worlds (and states of grace), and Janique Vigier’s celebration of Marlen Haushofer’s parables of isolation. Also in the issue: Angelo Hernandez Sias interviews Susan Choi; Audrey […]
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way […]
The Spring 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features Lidija Haas on Shulamith Firestone’s portrayal of life with mental illness; Moira Donegan on Peter Hujar’s photobook Portraits in Life and Death; and Jane Hu on Audition, the final novel in Katie Kitamura’s translation trilogy. Also in the issue: David Velasco talks with […]
WHEN SARAH SCHULMAN WALKED INTO MY APARTMENT, a month or so after Artforum magazine fired me in October 2023 for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation, her first words were, “How can I help?” I think this is the most ethical sentence in the English language. She said it like she meant […]
