Isaac Julien, Still Life Studies Series, No. 1, 2008, color photograph in light box. IN THIS AMBITIOUS SURVEY, editors Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer tell a story of increasing visibility for every permutation of homosexuality in visual art, making a case for the importance of queer culture in art history. Queerness contains multitudes, of course, […]
Peter Magubane, Nanny and Child, Johannesburg, 1956. FOR SOME SOUTH AFRICANS, apartheid infiltrated every facet of life. For others, it rarely impinged on the routine comforts of the suburbs. It all depended on which side of the bench one sat. Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester’s exhaustive exhibition and accompanying catalogue consider the photographic response to […]
Unheard melodies are sweeter, proposed John Keats, and Craig Dworkin, it seems, can only agree. In his new book, No Medium, Dworkin, a poet and critic who has been among the most active proponents of “conceptual poetry,” treats silent scores and mute records, books with blank pages, white canvases, erased drawings, and other such “foster-children of Silence and slow Time.” He considers, among many other works, Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” of 1951, Aram Saroyan’s untitled 1968 publication of a ream of blank typing paper, and Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring, 1992–97, an unmarked sheet of paper whose title, as
Back in 2009, the New Museum organized a show of the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, curated not by the museum’s staff but by Jeff Koons—the superstar artist who, as it so happens, features prominently in the tycoon’s holdings. The conflict of interest didn’t end there: Koons had designed Joannou’s thirty-five-meter yacht and was even the best man at Joannou’s wedding. Among those upset by this somewhat unusual—but also somehow emblematic—arrangement was William Powhida. Then a lesser-known artist, Powhida detailed the whole back-scratchy affair in a drawing called How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, which memorably
There are two types of nonbelievers in the world: those who were raised without religion and stayed firmly in the realm of the godless, and those who were brought up with religion and rejected it. I fall into the latter camp, having converted to atheism with an enthusiasm to match the zeal of any evangelical Christian. I’ve always liked the way the journalist and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, who was raised an atheist and educated as a scientist, talks about the values and morals she formed based on her knowledge of earthly things. So I was surprised to discover that her
The plot is simple and exalted. Beowulf is a prince of the Geats, a tribe living in what is now southern Sweden. He is peerlessly noble, brave, and strong. Each of his hands has a grip equal to that of thirty men. He is alone in the world; he was an orphan, and he never acquires a wife or children. Partly for that reason—because he has no one to behave toward in an intimate way—he has no real psychology.
In China, any unmarried woman over twenty-seven is considered a spinster, or a “leftover woman,” to translate the Chinese phrase more literally. “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?” asked the headline of an article that went up on the website of the All-China Women’s Federation shortly after International Women’s Day in 2011. “Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,” the piece read. “These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The
Edward St. Aubyn wrote his first novel shirtless, drenched in psychological sweat. In Never Mind, the fruit of that strain, we meet a number of characters, but only one or two—side characters—who don’t seem doomed. A father rapes his son. The same father murders a helpless injured person, and his friends don’t disapprove. One imagines a harrowed publicist gamely trying taglines: Why read a novel when you can read a drill? At the same time, St. Aubyn’s prose is so harsh and pretty, so funny and apt, that one reads helplessly on, reaching thickets of trauma less and less bearable.
In Land of No Rain, the first novel by the Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser, an exiled middle-aged Arab writer and editor (not unlike Nasser, who lives in London and works as an editor at a pan-Arab newspaper) finally returns to his homeland. Twenty years ago, Adham Jaber was a poet and revolutionary who participated in an assassination attempt on one of the line of “ginger-haired” generals ruling his country (the fictional Hamiya) and was forced, with other members of his leftist organization, to flee. When the book opens he is still living in London, “a grey-skied Babel crowned with the
Although Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel is full of knowledge, it is never merely knowing. It wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury. This is because Rahman is interested in the possession of knowledge, and in the politics of that possession.
The wish to be taken care of or looked after past the childhood years, to have our basic needs administered to without great exertion on our part, is not one, or so it seems to me, that is much addressed outside of the therapist’s office—or, perchance, the rehab culture, where such primal longings get articulated by way of a dependence on drugs and alcohol. For the rest of us, who secretly yearn to have someone to help us lace up our shoes in the morning, like Julian English does in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra—or, more generally, to have our
There exists a long, passionate, and somewhat batty tradition of writerly appreciation for feline ways, its entries cropping up among the serious work of many otherwise serious people. In The Informed Air (New Directions, 2014), a new collection of Muriel Spark’s criticism and occasional prose, Spark joins the chorus with a paean to her own cat, Bluebell. Spark is known for her novels, not her nonfiction. Yet in this volume’s frequently short and sometimes oddball selections, drawn from the full arc of her career, Spark’s precision and wit are much on display. “Ailourophilia,” too, is funny—but not only that. The
There are three decent books about the World Series of Poker. Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town recounts the first World Series held at Binion’s in Las Vegas in 1981—a ragtag gathering of clever cowboys jousting with one another for bragging rights. James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street captures the breaking wave in 2000, when the poker fad was expanding exponentially, the cowboys were sliding back into the foamy soup, and the bourgeois techies and digital corporations were rising into ascendancy. The book under review here, Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (Doubleday, $25), presents the
Is it true that everyone remembers the day death was first explained to them? I was seven and a hamster had died. The hamster had been given to me, perhaps, so that it could die and facilitate the conversation I then had with my mother. I remember not wanting to pay too close attention to what my mother was defining for me, so I listened instead to the faint sound I heard coming from downstairs. It was my father playing a record. I strained to make out the lyrics of the song and realized that, by doing so, I could
There’s little relief to be found in Roxane Gay’s riveting debut novel, An Untamed State. No air in the madly hot room Mireille Duval Jameson is forced to live in for thirteen harrowing days. No sense of self as her armed kidnappers erase every boundary she tries to preserve. No escape from the polarized economic realities of Port-au-Prince that resulted in her situation in the first place. Mireille, the US-born-and-raised daughter of a self-made Haitian construction magnate, was kidnapped in front of the family estate in Port-au-Prince to extract a $1 million ransom from her wealthy father. But Sebastian Duval,
This is something of an impromptu book review, to mark the publication three weeks ago by FSG of John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations, volume I devoted to poetry, volume II to prose. I take this to be a major publishing event. As do its superb editors Rosanna Wasserman and Eugene Richie, who go so far to quote Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy in a widely reported remark he made to the Guardian in 2008: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue.” So one of
South and west of central Chicago, there is no 22nd Street. Rather, between 21st and 23rd, the signs read Cermak Road. This thoroughfare follows the Red Line down from the big-money Loop to the threadbare African-American South Side. Roughly halfway between those two poles it crosses Pilsen. The neighborhood’s name derives from the Czech—the people of Chicago author Stuart Dybek—and it has always been an immigrant enclave. In the twenty-first century, the neighborhood is also home to a large community of Hispanics. Thus, the moving, energetic Painted Cities—the debut story collection of a Chicago author to be reckoned with—describes the
Recently, my daughter asked me to rewind the car radio so we could hear a song again. I was forced to explain the rudimentary technology known as broadcast, which doesn’t obey your commands so much as spray out an ignorant blast of waves in every direction. Her confusion at this ludicrously antiquated format led me to describe a battery of outmoded gadgets, like stationary telephones and bulky, blurry TV sets.
Ellen Willis, whose music writing recently received a much-deserved revival, was often drawn to the counterculture, progressive politics, and how the two overlapped. In this essay, originally published in 1989 in the Village Voice and reprinted in the new book The Essential Ellen Willis, she dwells on feminism, the concept of excess (sex and drugs), abstinence, gay rights, parenthood, and AIDS. Willis often finds her stride in complexity, and here she intricately examines and interrogates the notions of freedom she holds dear. Do all liberation movements set you free? Do conservative ways of life always result in constraint? It’s a
The “leaving New York” essay has become its own mini-genre. Joan Didion’s 1967 elegy to her time in the city, “Goodbye to All That,” was the pioneer of the form. In a 2013 collection named after Didion’s piece, twenty-eight writers also share how New York lost its luster. This year, Justin Hocking’s new memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, takes up the tradition, with another look at the ways in which the young and sort-of-young work out a relationship with their “suffocating, selfish mistress,” as Andrew Sullivan has called the city.
