• review • January 27, 2016

    The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks

    John Domini

    About halfway into Amber Sparks’s new collection of stories, a “feral” girl cursed by a witch, hiding out in a “wild, ancient wood,” receives an extraordinary visitor. A man “all black hair and sharp lines” drives up in a car that befits him, “sleek and modern.” The girl marvels: “It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things in the world.” The sheer weirdness of the arrival fetches a grin, and whips the narrative around like a sling, taking it from a disturbed fairy tale to a feminist Game of Thrones. The turnabout, we come to understand,

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  • excerpt • January 19, 2016

    On terror, empathy, and "The Seasons of Trouble"

    Anand Gopal

    This past fall, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released the results of a long-awaited inquiry into the final phase of the twenty-five-year war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It uncovered widespread mass killing, torture, disappearances, assassination, and rape. While the report blamed both sides, it reserved the harshest criticism for the Sri Lankan state, whose actions it said may amount to “crimes against humanity.” Yet the Sri Lankan government, which claimed it was fighting a war against terrorism, has

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  • review • January 08, 2016

    Dinner by César Aira

    Jon Bartlett

    The narrator of Argentine novelist César Aira’s 2004 short story “The Cart,” himself a writer, describes the affinity he feels for an errant shopping trolley that can move on its own, “like a little boat full of holes in search of adventure.” “Even our respective techniques were similar,” he writes of the apparently banal vehicle with magical powers: “progressing by imperceptible increments, which add up to make a long journey; not looking too far ahead.”

    This tendency to remind the reader of what he’s doing, seemingly while he’s doing it, is typical of Aira. He writes like an improviser:

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Tucker Max, 2011.

    Male-Order Brides

    On Tucker Max’s planet, men propose, and women are disposable. • Heather Havrilesky

    Some books serve a clear purpose. Other books serve no purpose at all. Still other books serve a clear purpose but not the one indicated in the book’s title. Because Tucker Max’s first book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was a compendium of comedic anecdotes about blind-drunk sex and repugnant hijinks that inadvertently became a kind of how-to lifestyle manual for aggressively unlikable douche bags everywhere, it follows that the author would come to pen an actual how-to lifestyle manual for aggressively unlikable douche bags that seems inadvertently poised to take the comedy world by storm.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016

    Soul Foods

    Bee Wilson explores how food shapes our sense of self. • Melanie Rehak

    At the end of my sister’s street in Cambridge, England, there’s a coffee shop called Hot Numbers. I go there every time I visit her, not just because the coffee is excellent, but also because of the treats they offer. Many of them are unavailable here in New York: flapjacks (not a pancake but a buttery, crumbly oat bar), Jaffa Cakes, and Bakewell tarts. Eating these delights is like traveling back in time for me. I spent a year of college studying in England, and when I wasn’t focused on W. B. Yeats or Philip Larkin, I was usually trying to order lunch in words that made no sense to me (I’ll

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Thomas Bachand, Three Seconds on the Fourth of July, Emerald Bay (detail), 2003, ink-jet print, 60 × 48". From Tahoe: A Visual History.

    Artful Volumes

    This season’s memorable art books. • Christopher Lyon

    The art historian Robert Farris Thompson taught us that African art is an “art of motion.” Kongo: Power and Majesty (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, $65) demonstrates that the most compelling objects of central African art are not static, timeless creations—as they may seem in museum displays—but urgent responses by a community under siege. This exhibition catalogue, spanning the late-fifteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, documents much of what remains of precolonial artworks from the Kongo kingdoms, many being gifts by African royalty to their European counterparts.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Lisa Yuskavage, Blonde Brunette and Redhead, 1995, triptych, oil on linen, overall 36 × 108".

    Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, Paintings 1991–2015

    Lidija Haas

    IT’S HARD TO alight on a response to Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings. The topless models and cute, lollipop-sucking young girls can look frosted, almost airbrushed, our culture’s detritus incongruously rendered with virtuosic technique. When paint is handled like this, both old masters and trashy magazines seem to regain their vivid alienness. It’s as if Yuskavage has managed to put her brush precisely in the place where we can still be unsettled.

    She taught herself to do it that way, getting a traveling education in European painting while at art school in the early 1980s. As she recalled in an

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt, ca. 1975.

    Dreg King

    Francis Bacon’s protégé remembers a carnivalesque scene of wicked wit and surprising kindness • Howard Hampton

    You have to hand it to Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in Your Blood: That acute title calls up an entire juicy slice—slab?—of modernist antiquity. Emerging from London’s queer-Dickensian gutter like a pestilent hedgehog from an air-raid shelter (or sewer, his detractors said), Bacon saturated the starched fabric of English art with images of, in the words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Blood, Devastation, Death, War, and Horror.” (In other words: What’s not to love?) Say what you want about the man—crown him first runner-up to Picasso in the artistic Mr. Universe pageant of the twentieth

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Publicity photo of Gregory Harrison, 1980s.

    Cruise Control

    The raunchy, brainy film writings of Boyd McDonald • Melissa Anderson

    Nearly twenty years ago, Susan Sontag, in “The Decay of Cinema,” lamented, “No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theater.” But a decade before this dirge was written, Boyd McDonald, who had largely abandoned going out to the movies in 1969 (for reasons never explained), proved that some of the most ecstatic cinephilic—and carnal—delights could be found sitting alone at home. McDonald lustily, discursively wrote about the films that aired at all hours on television, which he viewed in his single-room apartment on the Upper West Side, often

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Carol and Roger Angell, 1966.

    Late Innings

    Roger Angell looks back on a long and distinguished writing life • Michael Dirda

    Roger Angell is now ninety-five and pretty much the last staffer at the New Yorker to have been part of its golden age. He literally grew up with the magazine, his mother, Katharine White, being its first fiction editor and his stepfather, E. B. White, one of its defining writers. As a result, when Angell recalls his childhood and youth, he remembers New Yorker galleys piled around the house, the sound of typing from White’s study, and parties where you might chat with James Thurber.

    Angell is probably best known for three reasons: First, as a longtime New Yorker fiction editor, he shepherded

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016
    Félix Nadar, self-portrait, ca. 1855, salted paper print, 8 1/8 × 6 3/4".

    Up in the Air

    The adventures of Nadar, pioneering photographer and bohemian balloonist • Gaby Wood

    In nineteenth-century Paris, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar, took photographic portraits of everyone he knew. It’s quite a crowd: There are the illustrators Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré; the painters Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet; the composers Hector Berlioz and Gioachino Rossini; and the writers Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Charles Baudelaire. The standard Nadar shot is a three-quarter view, lit naturally from the left and a little above, with a plain mid-toned background and a sitter in dark clothes. If that sounds dull, a parade of his best

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2016

    Island Retreat

    The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson • Jeremy Lott

    Superficially, 2015 has been a banner year for Bill Bryson. After a long tour in development hell, the movie based on his 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods—his chronicle of a months-long trek, with an old friend, along the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail—finally found its way into American theaters in September. The film sported an all-star, long-toothed cast, including Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson. Robert Redford played Bryson, who in real life looks like your bearded, bespectacled, kindly uncle. It received mixed reviews. Domestic box-office numbers were about where you’d expect a moderately

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