print Summer 2019

Advice and Consent

Any time I have ever been in therapy, it has seemed simple to say whatever is on my mind. But one question that always lingers, which I have never had the nerve to ask, is What do you really think of me? It’s not only that I would be ashamed to ask. It’s also that I know the therapist would never say.

Like the religious person who wonders what God makes of their actions, the habitually analyzed can only guess what their therapist truly believes about them. Couples, too, wonder about the opinion of their counselor: Are we much worse than other couples? Do we perhaps have a certain charm?

Of

culture June 18, 2013

The Riot Grrrl Collection

The 1990s punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl has had a resurgence in recent years, in books such as Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), films like The Punk Singer, and the establishment of the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU’s Fales library.

The 1990s punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl has had a resurgence in recent years, in books such as Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), films like The Punk Singer, and the establishment of the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU’s Fales library. The Feminist Press has just published The Riot Grrrl Collection, which presents vivid reproductions of zines, flyers, and other works from the Fales archives. Editor and archivist Lisa Darms recently sat down with The Riot Grrrl Collection contributors Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman to discuss the book, answering questions submitted

culture Feb/Mar 2012

Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

In a letter to his lover, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller wrote that he was possibly the only writer in our time who has had the chance to write only as he pleased. This kind of hyperbole marked his audacious, pornographic monologue of a first novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was published in the US fifty years ago (after the Supreme Court overturned a quarter-century ban). Now, in Renegade, scholar Frederick Turner reassesses the work, making the case that the book and its author are as quintessentially American as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Turner’s volume is part of Yale University Press’s

interviews June 28, 2011

Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman

Misha and I have been good friends for ten years, At the beginning of our friendship, we ran a barroom lecture series called Trampoline Hall together, Now, our book about everything Misha knows, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, is being published.

Misha and I have been good friends for ten years. At the beginning of our friendship, we ran a barroom lecture series together called Trampoline Hall. Now, we are publishing a book called The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Initially I wanted to write a novel called The Moral Development of Misha, but after writing sixty pages, I threw it out. I had hoped to capture Misha’s way of being in the world and his opinions and point of view, but it wasn’t working as fiction. I realized that I preferred Misha’s words when they came from him, rather than when they were filtered through my imagination.

print Summer 2011

Valley of the Dolls (1966) by Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann’s roman à clef Valley of the Dolls was hated by high-culture critics when it was published in 1966, though it quickly became the year’s best seller. The novel follows three friends, Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, as they try to make it big in show business and find true love. Even when their dreams are partially realized, they cost the women an unbearable amount of frustration and heartbreak.

The New York Times called the novel part of the “narcotic” genre of literature, which has its reader “float[ing] down the river of lethargy,” but that’s nuts. Reading the book feels more

print Apr/May 2010

The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists

In the late 1960s, French artist Daniel Buren, on visiting many artists’ studios, was impressed by the “quality and richness, especially the sense of reality,” of the artworks. Encountering the same works later in museums and galleries, he found “they had lost their meaning and died, to be reborn as forgeries.” What had happened between their creation in the studio and their death in the gallery? In his seminal 1971 essay “The Function of the Studio,” Buren posited that an essential link was broken when the art left the site of its creation. Now, he revisits his essay in The Studio Reader, a

syllabi February 03, 2010

Secret Self-Help

When we talk about books, we hardly every talk about how they help. It is unfashionable: Browsing the self-help section of a bookstore seems as shameful as picking up a porn magazine at 7-Eleven. Interviewers seldom ask authors, “How is your book meant to help people?” (Instead, they ask the impossible, “What does it mean?”) Yet authors write with the hope of helping readers and themselves—by untangling emotional, intellectual, and existential problems. Perhaps contemporary literary culture doesn’t talk about books’ utility as a way to justify their lofty status as precious, impractical objects.

syllabi June 30, 2009

On Being an Artist

There are certain books that all young artists read. For example, the other night I met a young woman at a bar. She said she was a cartoonist, so I asked to see her studio. Going over the next night, I noticed on her shelves a book I cherished when I was eighteen: Salvador Dalí’s Diary of a Genius. It was interesting that she had glommed onto Dalí—just as I once had. But what lessons was it teaching her about the artist’s life? Likely the ones I, too, had absorbed, studying certain books so thoroughly that now it gives me a headache just to see their spines.

Sheila Heti is the author of the