“IT DOESN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE that no one wants to read this pathemata,” writes Maggie Nelson in her new book, Pathemata. Nelson is not speaking of the book itself, but rather about a document that provides much of its source material: a record she has made of her jaw pain, for the benefit […]
IN HER RECENT BOOK WAVE OF BLOOD, Ariana Reines states the obvious: “It’s a big mistake to kill someone, one person, one person.” I pause on the word “mistake” there. An odd word: pared down, it means “to badly seize,” to reach out and wrap your fingers around a reality that is incorrect. It describes […]
“I HAVE A THEORY THAT IT’S EASIER FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE to the north of the Canada–US border to imagine a world organized beyond the settler state,” writes the professor Kim TallBear (Dakota) in a recent post on her Substack, Unsettle, because the vast territory and small population to the border’s north make anti-Indigenous racism hyper-visible. […]
IN THE EARLY 2010S, photographer Diana Markosian traveled to Armenia to meet her father after a separation of more than fifteen years. They hadn’t seen one another since Diana’s mother, Svetlana, took her and her brother from Russia to California when she was seven. “I am Diana, your daughter,” she said. He replied, “Why did […]
The Winter 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features Audrey Wollen on Joy Williams’s stories of angels, demons, and the fate of humanity; Hermione Hoby on narratives of marriage and its dissolution; Jessi Jezewska Stevens on Ágota Kristóf’s confounding fictions of exile. On the cover is artist and poet Joe Brainard’s 1968 […]
YEARS AGO, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’t we just be divorced? Plus, what in divorce, a thing about as […]
IN AN INTERVIEW conducted in 1966, shortly after the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery, Marcel Duchamp makes a strange pronouncement. By that time Duchamp had become an American citizen and was living in New York. His interlocutor, Pierre Cabanne, asks him what he does when he visits Paris. “I […]
THE WRITER OF TWO COLLECTIONS of poetry, one collection of essays and stories, one massy novel (the recently reissued Miss MacIntosh, My Darling), and one unfinished biography of the turn-of-the-century socialist politician Eugene V. Debs, Marguerite Young (1908–1995) was born near New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two failed utopian communes that would become life-long […]
ONE OF MY CLOSEST friends in high school was what we called hapa in typical Los Angeles casually racist slang. We had semi-pejorative epithets for every ethnic group and deployed them affectionately and indiscriminately across demographics, our scrappy anthropology. In my friend’s case, she was half-Japanese and half-Yugoslav. Her Yugoslav father had a storied journey […]
AS A COMPILATION of the late David Graeber’s work, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . has several tasks, each of which it executes more fully than one might expect from a posthumous odds and sods collection. Capturing what this rogue anthropologist thought and how he thought is not that easy, as […]
LITTLE WALTER’S “Blues with a Feeling” is a majestic song whose title is kind of redundant. Blues is a feeling, whether filtered through Hank Williams’s full-moon howling or channeled through Jimi Hendrix’s rumbustious guitar. The emotional impact arrives far in advance of any intellectual engagement. The same process applies to the music of progressive jazz […]
ANYONE LOOKING for a summa on twenty-first-century architecture culture in New York—how shifting ideas in the design profession have transformed the landscape of the city (mostly for the better) over the past two-plus decades—could do worse than to read a few passages from Brooke Hodge’s introduction to Architecture. Research. Office. The book, grouped into sequential […]
ALEC SOTH, ONE OF THE MOST REVERED PHOTOGRAPHERS of the past twenty years, is also one of the most approachable. His homey, rambling, and relaxing YouTube videos are recorded in his personal library in Minnesota. The artist shows old pictures, flips through photo books, does AMAs (“ask me anything”), and tells stories about how his […]
ELAINE MAY DIDN’T SET OUT to become a director. What she really wanted to do was write. Her first film, A New Leaf, came about partly because it was 1968 and Paramount knew it would look good to hire a woman director. And partly because May wouldn’t sell her script without being guaranteed director approval—the […]
EVEN A CURSORY GLANCE at the life of Joe Brainard reveals him to have been something of a genius of friendship. Since the artist and writer died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994 at the age of fifty-three, his legacy has been steadfastly tended to by a band of his contemporaries, who jump at the chance […]
YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants […]
LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIRST SAW JILL JOHNSTON in Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s indelible film Town Bloody Hall (1979),which documents a raucous 1971 “dialogue on women’s liberation.” Norman Mailer, the panel’s token misogynist and nominal moderator, introduces Johnston as “that master of free-associational prose in The Village Voice,” for which (I’d later learn) […]
“WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO BE LIFTED UP and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness?” Could you use “some relief from misery, from melancholy”? Are you seeking a way to feel less “anxious, wretched, bored”? No, nobody is asking you to pay for Transcendental Meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, or a detox diet. Perhaps, […]
IT HAS BEEN SAID that in his greatest roles Al Pacino plays characters who through temperament and actions—whether noble or nefarious—wind up utterly alone. Cut off, even, from some vital part of themselves, the mercy or cynicism that might have restored balance to their lives. But what Al Pacino character craves balance? His Frank Serpico […]
PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, Joan Didion sitting on the floor of a Los Angeles recording studio in 1968, gazing up at Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band she went on to describe as “apocalyptic missionaries of sex.” If our patron saint of Californian disenchantment ever appeared starstruck, even girlish, it was surely here, in […]
