There used to be a belief—or maybe it’s just a symptom of being young—that if you yelled and expressed great dismay at something or someone, it or he could thereby be stopped. This had to happen, didn’t it, once everyone had risen up and turned against this bad thing or person? Then, just maybe, we would be free of at least one torture. We could feel good!

New York City might be the only place on earth where you could conceivably date someone for months on end and never be invited into their apartment. But special mention should go to Barry Yourgrau, who managed to keep his soignée food-writer girlfriend (and almost everyone else, even the super) out of his place for five long years. So ashamed was he of his unruly belongings, and yet so deeply attached to them, he tells us in his memoir, Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (Norton, $26), that he couldn’t stomach any intruders. When

In Wilfrid Sheed’s caustically hilarious 1970 novel, Max Jamison, the titular hero—the “dean of American critics,” as someone introduces him, and also a bit of a bastard—can’t shut down his brilliant critical instincts even when off the clock. When is a brilliant critic ever off the clock? He pans his wife (“God, he hated stupidity”), and lying awake at night, he pans his life (“The Max Jamison Story failed to grip this viewer. Frankly, I found the point eluding me again and again. The central character is miscast”). He disparages his looks (“Thinning hair might be all right but not

William Eggleston’s Democratic Forest begins with a single tree. Then, across ten volumes and more than a thousand photographs, we see a collective landscape, a vision that sweeps around the United States and overseas, through city centers and to the most forlorn edges of forest on a country road. But in the opening images, we are squarely in the American South, with an open ruin of a building, a gray storm waiting at the end of a road’s curve, the shell of a formal plantation house whose grand arcade has been overtaken by branches, neat crops stretching to a vanishing

The reason we love a song usually has to do with longing: for a person, a time, a way of life. That is why my teenage songs have stuck by me. Back then, I did hardly anything but long. This yearning led me to doggedly pursue music and unreasonably identify with what I liked. Jonathan Lethem memorably described this phenomenon in his 2012 essay about the Talking Heads: “I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” This way of thinking might

Per publishing custom, the first pages of In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth book and first essay collection, present a selection of critical praise for her previous work. The nature of this praise, all of it pertaining to Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland, is both predictable and particular, with an emphasis on the author’s reputation as “an elegant stylist.” The blurbs celebrate Lahiri’s “legendarily smooth . . . prose style,” her “brilliant language,” and her ability to place “the perfect words in the perfect order.” Beyond the usual hosannas, what emerges is the sense of an author defined by her

A PARADOXICAL DILEMMA awaits the art restorer charged with repairing the damage done by time and mishap to an Alberto Burri painting, because his canvases were made by employing just those elements: aging, accident, and downright destruction. Trained as a doctor in his native Italy, Burri served as a medic during World War II, was captured in Tunisia, and was interned in a POW camp in Texas, which is where he began to paint. When he returned home, he found a culture beaten down by years of Fascist rule and a landscape blasted by Allied bombs. The ravages of war

The Los Angeles–based poet Melissa Broder writes about the hot-pink toxins inhaled every day by girls and women in a late-capitalist society (a few evocative phrases from her latest book: “diet ice cream,” “pancake ass,” “Botox flu”) and the seemingly impossible struggle to exhale something pure, maybe even eternal. “I tried to stuff a TV / in the hole where prayer grows,” she wrote in her pummeling 2012 collection, Meat Heart, which was followed by the searing Scarecrone in 2014. Here, from her website, is her version of an author’s bio: “when i was 19 i went thru a breakup,

I don’t care how much your parents fucking loved you—you’ve got problems. Me, I was abused by an alcoholic father, molested by a neighbor, kidnapped and raped at fifteen, so my PTSD is like a fungus with more PTSD mushrooming on top of it. I go to therapy to tell all these crazy stories over and over till they become just stories. Like a house that grows smaller and smaller out the back window of a car. Luckily, I’m a musician, so I can also write songs about this stuff. I can’t tell you how powerful it is to write