“LITERARY CRITICS do fulfill a very important role, but there seems to be a problem with much contemporary criticism,” Simon Leys once wrote. “One has the feeling that these critics do not really like literature—they do not enjoy reading.” This was a line my mind kept drifting to as I plodded through Lauren Oyler’s debut essay collection, No Judgment. The book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained. Who cares, really, about any of this? Gawker, the firing of Ben Mora, a TED Talk from 2010, Richard Brody’s New Yorker review of Tár, an Instagram

IN TODAY'S INSTALLMENT of “You’re Never Too Old to Learn,” it turns out that it’s not just its location that makes the state of Ohio the heartland of America. It’s also because, as its native son Hanif Abdurraqib writes in There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, the seventeenth state of the Union is “shaped like a heart. A jagged heart. A heart with sharp edges. A heart as a weapon.” This disclosure, one in a torrent of observations, ruminations, and reveries tightly woven into the book’s narrative, gives you some idea of Abdurraqib’s willingness to pile everything he’s able into

SOMETIMES WHAT CONSERVATIVES SEEM TO FEAR MOST from liberals is not their money or their ideology but their judgment. Beneath the vast tide of right-wing grievance, there is a current of profound insecurity, a suspicion that liberals don’t think conservatives are good enough. There is nothing they desire more than the sight of a liberal humbled into seeing the light. To cater to this desire, the media has produced a peculiar new kind of pundit: the conservative who pretends to be a liberal—one agreeing, in spite of themselves, with the conservatives.

You will best understand Housewife: Why

The Spring 2024 issue of Bookforum is online now! In this edition: Christine Smallwood on Constance Debré’s novels of transformation; Joy Williams on Vladimir Sorokin’s high-risk fiction; Harmony Holiday on being haunted by Billie Holiday; Lisa Borst on Nicholson Baker’s ways of seeing; Melissa Anderson on the life of Warhol superstar Candy Darling; Gene Seymour on Hanif Abdurraqib’s love letter to basketball and his Ohio hometown; Moira Donegan on a confused history of homemakers; Ann Manov on Lauren Oyler’s meditations on Goodreads, anxiety, and gossip; Becca Rothfeld on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s

TO TRAVEL FROM Massapequa Park, a small town on Long Island, to Penn Station on the LIRR takes about an hour. It was a commute that Candy Darling made countless times between 1962, the year she turned eighteen, and 1974, the year she died, at age twenty-nine. The return trip from Manhattan—where she would first meet Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Jane Fonda, Werner Schroeter, and so many other important collaborators and friends—often required Candy to travel under the cover of dark and to take a cab from the station directly to the Cape Cod house where her mom, Terry Slattery,

“IN THE BEGINNING God created the heaven and the earth.” You have to admit it’s a hell of an opening line. “When I think there was a day when a human first wrote those words,” Marilynne Robinson says, “I am filled with awe.” And that, for better and worse, is the kind of book Reading Genesis is—Robinson muses through Genesis, telling you what she thinks, getting filled with awe. It’s a book-length reading response. But it’s a reading response by Marilynne Robinson, who has written a few of the finest novels in English, so I’ll take it.

Of course, she’s not really thinking of the day when a

HER PLACE IN THE WINGS 

Billie Holiday, née Elenora Fagan, is one of America’s few remaining antiheroes, the last surviving muse of the Jazz Age, and the only correct answer to Amiri Baraka’s question: Who will survive America? She survives by haunting us, and in the same way that Baraka declares himself one of Miles Davis’s children in his conversational poetic elegy for Miles, I am one of Billie Holiday’s children, I am her elegy and redemption. My mother was born a couple of months after she died in 1959, and over a decade earlier my father had formally changed his name from James Brown to