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 […]
ARIANA REINES: Last time we spoke, it was over the summer, before Health and Safety (Pantheon, $27) came out. It was compulsive reading for me—at least five books in one. I don’t know how you did it. You wrote an ecstatic account of music, drugs, sex, and expanding consciousness simultaneous to a sober reportage on […]
JAMIE HOOD: Hello! CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in. HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your youth, as well as an erotic Bildungsroman that eventually traces your […]
SHEILA HETI: Your new novel, Help Wanted (W. W. Norton, $29), is about the collective action of a group of workers at a big-box store. They try to get their hated boss out of their hair in a way that is counterintuitive and comic. It feels completely different from your 2013 book, The Love Affairs […]
Since dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter, Frederic Tuten has lived in Paris; traveled through Mexico and South America; earned a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American literature; acted in a short film by Alain Resnais; conducted summer writing workshops in Tangiers with Paul Bowles; and written fictions and essays for the artist’s catalogues of Eric Fischl, David Salle, John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. He has also written some of the slyest and most beguiling fiction ever to be described as experimental. His five novels include The Adventures of Mao
