• print • Fall 2023

    Uncut Femme

    "WHO IS Julia Fox?” This is the question taken up by Fox’s highly anticipated memoir Down the Drain (Simon & Schuster, $29)—so highly anticipated, in fact, that I was required to sign an NDA promising I wouldn’t leak any details from the press copy I received, the plain white cover of which read only, enticingly, EMBARGOED. It was also the question some of my, frankly, uncool friends and acquaintances asked me when I excitedly told them I was reviewing Fox’s book. “Josh Safdie’s muse?” I prompted. “Actually, she’s her own muse. You know . . . Uncut Gems?” I pronounced it “unkah jamz,” as Fox

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  • print • Fall 2023

    The Journalist and the Editor

    WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. 

    Which brings me to Janet

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  • print • Fall 2023

    Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf

    AFTER BEING KICKED OUT of art school for creating a model car with human legs that looked like it was pissing on a map of Detroit, the Conceptual artist Pippa Garner built her infamous Backwards Car (1973–74), reconfiguring a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne to drive trunk-first. On its maiden voyage, drivers were stunned: “I could have caused a fifty-car pileup without breaking the law. Terrorism meets art,” Garner later said. Her cars-as-sculpture, gizmos, and sketches are documented in $ell Your $elf, a new book released through Pioneer Works Press in conjunction with a major retrospective at Art

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  • print • Fall 2023

    Let It Reed

    BEYOND AN OLDER SIBLING’S headphones wringing the sweet, distorted fuzz of the Velvet Underground out and into my ears, my second most notable encounter with Lou Reed was in the pages of the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which has a whole section dedicated to Bangs and his relentless sparring with Reed. A book within a book, almost. There are two interviews that would, today, seem alarming in both their approach and the nature of their candidness, with Bangs demeaning Reed’s pal David Bowie, Reed taking the bait, Bangs shouting that Reed is full of shit. The

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  • print • Fall 2023

    On the Sly

    IN THE AWARDS-SWEEPING 2021 documentary Summer of Soul, a man named Darryl Lewis recalls his first Sly and the Family Stone encounter, at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. In those days, he says, “When you saw a Black group, what you expected to see was, generally speaking, all men, all dressed in matching suits, ready even before they hit the stage to perform.” But here, Sly and company “kind of saunter out,” men and women, Black and white, a living quilt of psychedelic patterns, knit caps, and sundry frippery. “The instruments weren’t tuned,” Lewis says. “You wonder, What are they doing

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  • print • Fall 2023

    Surface Tension

    A FRIEND OF MINE—the Canadian scholar of Buddhism David Drewes—once observed that we exist at different levels of magnification. Every moment of existence is susceptible to practically infinite expansion—or to shrinking almost to nothingness. We mostly speak and think at a conventional degree of magnification where experience appears to fit into conveniently labeled boxes—“tired,” “successful,” “female,” etc. But around the time that science was discovering the mysteries of cosmic scale—the fact that surfaces, for example, exist at some levels of magnification, but not at others—writers began

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  • print • Fall 2023

    Seeing and Being Scene

    LAST YEAR, THE FIRST Chinese American movie star was saddled with yet another pioneering honorific: Anna May Wong became the first actress to have the figurative currency of her face made literal, minted on a US quarter. This star, born on silver nitrate, found an afterlife in copper-nickel. I can think of no wrier fate for someone trailed by so much ornamental simile, most often compared to things: Wong’s ex-lover Eric Maschwitz thought her “a piece of porcelain”; Walter Benjamin called her a “chinoiserie specimen” and likened her name to “full moons in a bowl of tea.” I am doing laundry the

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  • print • Fall 2023

    Already, I Was Disappointed by a Lot

    IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with The Face magazine, songwriter-producer Jack Antonoff—who has counted Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde in his enviable stable—went on a rant against the NYC scene in general and Dimes Square specifically. “Well, what’s the export?” he asked. “What’s the book, what’s the band?” 

    Good question! For books, one could do worse than those of Natasha Stagg, a cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same. She is so plugged in that she nearly titled her new book Name Dropping, as she warns us up front: “one of my favorite pastimes, you’ll see.” Coming to

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Bookforum Is Back!

    BOOKFORUM IS BACK. We’ve been on hiatus since December 2022, and the Summer 2023 edition is the first issue produced in conjunction with our new publishing partner, The Nation, a venerable magazine committed to fiercely independent journalism. Our mission is to continue the conversation where we left off, publishing essays by writers who are deeply engaged with books and contemporary culture.

    Since 1994, Bookforum has staked out its own territory, inviting authors to take on—with critical acuity and personality—fiction, art, literary theory, philosophy, politics, and more. Over the years, we

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Atlas Slugged

    IF YOU WERE TO HAVE TWO MEN FIGHT EACH OTHER with a minimum of rules, should they do it in a boxing ring, or a plexiglass cube, or a cage (and maybe an electrified one)? These were the novel logistical questions faced by the founders of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, including a used-car salesman turned ad mogul and a Brazilian described by Playboy as “the toughest man in the United States,” as they attempted to identify what form of martial art was most effective at incapacitating an opponent. Inspired by a Chuck Norris flick, they chose the cage—no electricity—to determine whether, say,

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  • print • Summer 2023

    A Loss for Words

    AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.” As Jenni Nuttall

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  • print • 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

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