THIS IS ONLY AN OPINION, BUT: no one should make art about their divorce until they’ve experienced at least one heartbreak after the marriage’s end. I keep an inventory of all the times I encounter an artist who manages, in telling a story about a divorce, to also include the story of another breakup that followed the supposedly definitive one. I love to see anything that complicates more straightforward accounts of life after divorce. That next heartbreak—the more devastating, the better—must be reckoned with, because it dispels any remaining illusions, or maybe delusions, about what one is capable of in

WILLA CATHER WAS A MASTER OF BEGINNINGS. O Pioneers! (1913), her first novel after the false start of Alexander’s Bridge (1912), opens on a provocatively odd note: “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.” Soon the attention shifts to the “cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky . . . set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were

The Winter 2024 issue of Bookforum is online now! In this edition: Gene Seymour revisits John A. Williams’s unsung 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am; Jennifer Krasinski writes about Anne Carson’s unruly art of renewal; Carl Wilson considers Kyle Chayka’s book on algorithms and our supposedly flat new world; Jamie Hood reads Blake Butler’s anguished portrait of his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak; Katie Kadue reviews My Weil, Lars Iyer’s reconfigured campus novel; Kay Gabriel explores loss, abundance, and time in Robert Glück’s About Ed; and so much more. Also: reading recommendations on the war in Gaza, a

“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,”

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

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

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 to explore different scales of experience. Two basic methods emerged, which are still with

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?” 

BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one

IN HIS 1980 ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN SCENE, “Within the Context of No Context,” George W. S. Trow supplies an anecdote from Harvard in the early 1960s. During an art history class on the Dutch masters, a Black student described Rembrandt as “‘belonging’ to the white students in the room.” The white students totally agreed with this. “They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt,” Trow writes. “They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress.” 

FRANZ KAFKA’S LAST STORY was a fable about art and labor. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is a tale told by a mouse who, with marked erudition and fair-mindedness, reflects on an extraordinary community member, the singer Josephine. At times of danger or emergency, the news will spread that she plans to sing. The community assembles, and Josephine, delicate and frail, stands before them in song, her arms spread wide, her throat stretched high. The tones emanating from that delicate throat are, according to some, not singing at all but rather ordinary piping—if anything, weaker and thinner than the