“You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this.” Slate writer Amanda Hess received this tweet from the charmingly named user “headlessfemalepig.” She wrote about the experience—and, more generally, about the hazards of being a woman online—for Pacific Standard in early 2014. In that article, for which she later won a National Magazine Award, she details some of the exhausting consequences of online harassment: “Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services,

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world’s richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch’s Maldoror. I am not writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I

“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks, published

Once I went to a party at Aziz Ansari’s house. This was the first and only time I’d been invited to a celebrity party, but I tried to play it cool. I brought two friends and a bottle of decent bourbon. When we walked in the door, I instantly regretted bringing the booze. There was a bartender in a suit making signature cocktails. Of course this was not a BYOB event. Stars: They’re not just like us, no matter what Us Weekly says.

At a party recently, I overheard someone in his twenties talking about how much he enjoyed a television show called The Fall because it made him think about how “being a man is its own kind of disease.” People of both genders nodded in a sympathetic way. If this is a moment when young people seek out opportunities for misandry, there are plenty of occasions to do so; even pulp entertainments like Game of Thrones and Mad Max: Fury Road put men at the center not to assert male power but to invite us to squirm at its failure. But

When the “linguistic escape artist” Christine Brooke-Rose died in 2012, at the age of eighty-nine, she was already a buried author, her formidable oeuvre little read or appreciated. With elements of science fiction, metafiction, and nouveau roman, her writing has been called “resplendently unreadable,” “incomprehensible and pretentious,” and simply “difficult.” Her 1998 novel Next, featuring twenty-six narrators and written without the verb “to have,” reappeared earlier this month from Verbivoracious Press, a “nanopress” dedicated to reissuing Brooke-Rose’s work.

Such a lithe, unassuming novel, Vendela Vida’s latest! In this study of fragility and resilience, lives and identities are revealed to be as precarious as houses of cards. The plot recollects that of Vida’s previous book, The Lovers, in that it, too, presents an American heroine looking for solace in the East in the aftermath of a crushing personal disaster. But The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is a much subtler and more agile creature. It begins in a realist mode but sheds this skin as it goes, becoming in its second half a gently postmodern, surrealist philosophical novel on the

Period sex finally gets its due as dramatic device in Mary-Beth Hughes’s emotionally raw but ultimately elegant novel The Loved Ones. The scene in question opens, as all do in this novel, in medias res, with unhinged rake Nick Devlin in a hotel room with “a pretty girl who seems to have bled all over the bedding.” By the time this passage arrives, near the middle of the book, the dissembling of the Devlin family has already been established: perpetually moving between the East Coast of the United States and England, each member copes with repressed pain through forms of

At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death.

Near the beginning of Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head, an account of Graham Greene’s imprint on his inner life, the peripatetic Iyer, on a bus in Bolivia, notices a woman stealing glances at him.

A single word may send a reader—or viewer—down the wrong path. On the cover of ALIBIS: SIGMAR POLKE 1963–2010 (Museum of Modern Art, $75), the title appears against a close-up of snakeskin—printed on boards embossed with a scaly texture—framing a photo of the artist as a child manipulating a marionette. In the book’s lead essay, curator Kathy Halbreich proposes that Polke studiously avoided any signature style or medium, “so that his aesthetic method . . . enacted the role of an alibi.” But alibis brings to mind excuses, and the book takes a historically constrained viewpoint—the text is full of