culture Summer 2023

The Story Reteller

WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, safely to the other side, in a single bound. It was then that, exhaling, I realized

culture Summer 2019

Magic Mirror

One afternoon I was in the office of a psychoanalyst I know, scanning the alphabetical shelves for a book by Melanie Klein on envy and gratitude, when I glimpsed old copies of Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984) and saw a chance to get some perspective. Malcolm is a magazine writer’s writer: No journalist of her stature is so frequently discussed among people I know who write “pieces” while being undiscussed by people I know who don’t. The analyst remembered finding In the Freud Archives especially interesting, but had nothing interesting about it to say, so

fiction Summer 2018

Sea Change

FAYE HAS JUST BOARDED an airplane when Kudos, the third novel in a trilogy about her middle life, begins. She boarded, after lunch with a billionaire, another airplane at the start of the first novel, Outline. She was reading a spam e-mail from an astrology service predicting “a major transit . . . in [her] sky” when the second, Transit, began. Passenger flight explains these incredible novels. At first, for several pages, it’s hard to relax. Why must we be in this stifled, banal environment, with no room to think? How long do we have to sit here? The air cools, dims. Suddenly we are on a higher

print Sept/Oct/Nov 2017

A View of Her Own

BEGINNING THE SECOND PARAGRAPH of her 1973 essay on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set, published in the New York Review of Books, which she cofounded, Elizabeth Hardwick had a line on the lesser members of that mutual entourage: “Certain peripheral names vex the spirits.” When the essay appeared a year later in Seduction and Betrayal, her formational work on the fates of literary women and women in literature, the line had changed and become: “Certain peripheral names scratch the mind.” No editor, and perhaps only this writer, would make such a change. Unnecessary, it’s instructive. “Certain

print June/July/Aug 2017

Secondhand Emotion

TINA TURNER PUT OUT her most popular song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” a year before I was a fetus, but on nice days when I was a child it played so often on the boom box in the neighbor’s backyard that I thought it was new. I was already going to be a critic: I thrilled to her spinto mezzo-soprano, memorized her words so I could sing along, and then the second the song ended, for about the thirtieth time, rolled my eyes and said to my brother, “This is so stupid. ‘Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?’ Then who needs an arm when an arm can be broken?!” A few months later, I saw

interviews April 13, 2017

Bookforum talks with Durga Chew-Bose

A critic who prefers the term “enthusiast,” an essayist who worries she’s really a poet, Durga is an unrivalled player of what Doris Lessing, in The Golden Notebook, calls “the game.”

“Should I try to change my pitch?” Durga wonders, in consideration of her natural speaking voice, in an essay called “Upspeak.” “Should I try to sound more staid?” She asks her father how she could learn to speak differently. Easy, he replies: “Stop reacting to everything.” But then there would be no book for an essay called “Upspeak” to be in, and happily there is a book, Too Much and Not the Mood, a first collection of fourteen prose pieces in which Durga reacts to, and is acted upon by, the whole of quotidian life, sussing out the unobvious in sentences often as pixely and coruscating, as

print Apr/May 2017

The American Experiment

FUNNY THAT EVERY PLACE Joan Didion visits is falling apart. "A problem of making connections," her first column for Life, begins with a note on why her three-year-old daughter cannot, in Hawaii, go to the beach: "She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected." In "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," her essay on Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, the phrase Summer of Love is never used, nor is the word love, except in ironic quotes from kids who know nothing. Bad trip occurs three times. Feel good once:

print Feb/Mar 2017

Ever Green

I WAS HALFWAY through a biography of Patricia Highsmith that said her hero among her contemporaries was a novelist with the last name Green, and so the next time I was in Mercer Street Books I went right to the G's, stopping when I found a volume that must be what I was looking for, because it had the name Green on the mint spine of a Penguin Twentieth Century Classic and because the names of the three novels on it arrested me. After I had read Loving, Living, and Party Going, then everything else by the author, and then begun writing what you're reading, I realized that in the used bookstore

fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2016

Private Enemy Number One

Heroin doesn’t sound like heroine by accident. The name for the drug derives from hero, or heroes, as in the late-nineteenth-century soldiers on morphine who fought through their injuries and floated home. The same then-legal morphine was popular among women of the upper classes, who used it to socialize where drinking was considered a man’s game and to survive what they felt to be either their boredom or their subjugation, depending how woke a lady can be while she’s nodding off. Pauline Manford, the rich and inchoate lead in a middling Edith Wharton book, Twilight Sleep, refuses to soldier

print June/July/Aug 2016

Killing Time

“Sometimes I joke, well, I must be really good,” says Gary Indiana, sweet and wry, lighting his third cigarette of the four he allows himself daily. “To have been such a fucked-up mess, and to still have a body of work that I think—I hope—will live after me, that means I must really have been good.” We are outside Lucien, the Lower East Side bistro, after our interview, during which he did not swear at all. I note this because in his memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, out last year, he complains that one young interviewer added obscenities to his answers to make him sound edgier. As if

interviews May 24, 2016

Bookforum talks with Gary Indiana

In any story, or any love story, where two people are crazy, it’s usually the case that if they were separated, only one would be crazy.

“Sometimes I joke, well, I must be really good,” says Gary Indiana, sweet and wry, lighting his third cigarette of the four he allows himself daily. “To have been such a fucked-up mess, and to still have a body of work that I think—I hope—will live after me, that means I must really have been good.” We are outside Lucien, the Lower East Side bistro, after our interview, during which he did not swear at all. I note this because in his memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, out last year, he complains that one young interviewer added obscenities to his answers to make him sound edgier. As if

politics February 08, 2016

Confessions (On Intimacy, or Supposing You Understand)

People who write professionally about Mariah Carey are required to note her staggering five-octave range, her fourteen top-ten albums, and her insane number of number-one singles (eighteen and counting). But I’m not here to count or be professional. I’m here to talk about Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel (2009), Mariah’s novel-length album, which is the thing I listen to while I try and try to write about intimacy.

“It’s a Wrap” is the eighth song on Memoirs, and it’s the song at which you just know the album is a failure. Produced by geniuses, it’s indulgent. It’s meandering, low-key, overlong,

fiction Feb/Mar 2016

The Anxiety of Influencers

No novel has taken the task of defining a generation more literally than Generation X, Douglas Coupland’s first-person narrative of post-Reagan, post-college drift, with its long lexicon of neologisms for the 1990s: Cryptotechnophobia, Conspicuous Minimalism, Lessness, McJob, Mid-Twenties Breakdown. Published without hype in the spring of 1991, Generation X was a word-of-mouth best seller by fall. “I don’t want to be a ‘spokesperson,’” Coupland told a newspaper that winter. “I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things. We’re sick of stupid labels, we’re sick of

fiction Dec/Jan 2016

Bed and Bored

The plot of Clancy Martin’s new novel, Bad Sex, is rickety; it makes the narrative sway. Brett, a writer, is married to Paul, a hotelier with kids. The couple live in Mexico City. When a storm hits Cancún, Brett goes to check on a property there. By chance, her husband’s banker, Eduard, is also in town; by luck, he looks like Benicio Del Toro, if only because Benicio Del Toro is the one hot and famous Latino of whom Martin—or Martin’s reader—has heard. Some months later, Paul discovers her and Eduard’s affair by way of, what else, her phone bills, and when Brett tries to talk him out of his

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2015

The Passion According to Carol Rama

CAROL RAMA can’t help seeing red. Red are the tongues and the nails and the tips of men’s dicks in her dirty watercolors, painted in her native Turin from 1936, when she was a teenage autodidact, until 2006, when she became too senile to work. Red is her favorite color, she once told an interviewer, “because of something I have always wanted to have been: a bullfighter. To be male. Beautiful.” In the same interview, she compared herself to a mad cow instead (Madame Bovine, c’est moi).

This comprehensive new monograph ends with those ideas and begins with a bad interpretation thereof. Paul B.

interviews May 29, 2015

Bookforum talks with Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is the only serious and literary person I’ve encountered whose speech is filled with more “you knows” than mine. Unlike mine, perhaps, her verbal tic is not so much a crutch as a helping hand: she’ll be saying something fast, brilliant, and thoughtful, and maybe you don’t totally get it, but when she says “you know,” she allows you to feel as if you do.

Maggie Nelson is the only serious and literary person I’ve encountered whose speech is filled with more “you knows” than mine. Unlike mine, perhaps, her verbal tic is not so much a crutch as a helping hand: she’ll be saying something fast, brilliant, and thoughtful, and maybe you don’t totally get it, but when she says “you know,” she allows you to feel as if you do. Likewise, in her writing she seems able to address anyone, speaking to her readers with the same cool fluency and presumption of being understood she shows in conversing with the philosophers, poets, and heroes of nonfiction—Roland

culture Apr/May 2015

You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends

JUNE 1967. While Valerie Solanas issues a list of grievances called the SCUM Manifesto, Dorothy Iannone makes a grocery list for a boat trip to Iceland, where she will fall in love with fellow artist Dieter Roth, leaving her first (and last) marriage for the muse. A new book of Iannone’s works on paper begins with a reprinting of the series“An Icelandic Saga,” 1978-86, which tells of the meet-cute as if it were myth and continues nonchronologically through the now octogenarian’s ouevre, collecting the more memorable proofs of her love for what she, like Tibetan Buddhists and Heideggerians,

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

Other Rooms

THE PHOTOGRAPHS of Jo Ann Callis describe (mostly) misnomered food, bodies, and household objects in stiffly fetishistic tableaux. Collected, they remind me of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Stein: “Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned.” Callis: A (woman’s) hand, dredged in flour, nails blackened, rests flat in a yolk of honey on a smooth, eggshell-colored bedsheet. You also glimpse a thigh, and the glint of hairs. Nothing in the image tells you why. It appears halfway through this new volume, which is the first to survey skin in Callis’s work—and, with its funny, silky slippages,

Sarah Nicole Prickett