| ( ! ) Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$media in /var/www/bookforum.com/prod/src/BookforumFrontendBundle/Controller/BlogController.php on line 161 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call Stack | ||||
| # | Time | Memory | Function | Location |
| 1 | 0.0000 | 404464 | {main}( ) | .../app.php:0 |
| 2 | 0.0024 | 679392 | AppKernel->handle( ) | .../app.php:49 |
| 3 | 0.0116 | 1861944 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle( ) | .../Kernel.php:201 |
| 4 | 0.0116 | 1927896 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:80 |
| 5 | 0.0343 | 4208056 | Bookforum\FrontendBundle\Controller\BlogController->listAction( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:158 |
A 2013 report on the Obama administration's reaction to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the costs and consequences of a military response.
That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording. People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals. I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I’d found it, without change or addition. I collected audio of thunderstorms, music coming out of cars, the subway trains rumbling underfoot; it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral. I had a binaural setup, two little mics in my ears that looked
When Making It was first published in 1967, it ripped through the airless parlor of American letters like a great belch. The man responsible, the literary critic Norman Podhoretz, sat smirking with relish at the revolting thing he'd just done. At the time, he was the editor of Commentary, the magazine that, along with Partisan Review, had published many of the midcentury writers who came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, so he'd had a private view of their jousting egos and venomous political squabbles. Making It pried all this open. It electrified the previously staid public reputations
WHAT IF YOU ADAPTED the 2016 election campaign into a play? How would you stage this grueling saga about a bunch of uniformly unlikable characters in unhappy situations saying patently ridiculous things? You could start by looking at Mark Peterson's new book from the campaign trail, Political Theatre, in which he presents our nationwide absurdist freak-out as a stark melodrama. His pictures of media scrums, starstruck Trumpkins, forlorn Jeb! events, Village of the Damned–looking Rubio fans, Bernie in various grumpy poses, and tragically overconfident Hillary rallies remind us exactly why our
I must start with the ending: In a postscript to her collection of highly crafted stories of desire, French novelist and professor Anne Garréta undermines the project she has developed in the preceding chapters. Throughout, she conjures past lovers and those she has wanted—one woman after another, fashioned into words from memory. Then she casts doubt on the entire pursuit. Why write about women who incited desire—even if the desire held a terrifying sway—when we live in the time of the logorrhea of desire? There's surely nothing transgressive left about it in our age of "pornocracy." How to
Mary Gaitskill's nonfiction differs from her fiction not in quality—the essays in Somebody with a Little Hammer are as intense as the stories—but in delivery and voice. Like Chekhov, Mary Gaitskill uses simple, concrete language to bottle human desire. (She would not use that metaphor. In fact, there are few authors less likely to resort to metaphor than Gaitskill.) Here, though, the first person allows Gaitskill to turn the camera on herself in a way that fiction precludes. In her unboxing of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Gaitskill opens with a joke that both perforates her subject and undoes a
Readers could be forgiven for assuming that the biographer of an architect might devote her most incisive analysis to the work of her subject, particularly if that subject happens to be widely acknowledged as one of the masters of the twentieth century. The first, bracing surprise in Wendy Lesser's new account of the life of Louis Kahn, then, is that some of its most insightful passages are dedicated to a structure that was not even designed by Kahn, and is surely a serious contender for the title of Worst Building in America. The "monstrosity" in question is New York's current Penn Station,
In February, Amnesty International published a report on the Saydnaya Military Prison in Syria that made for especially gruesome reading. The headline revelation, that the Syrian authorities killed up to thirteen thousand people in extrajudicial executions at Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015, surprised exactly no one familiar with the structure of the Syrian state or the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its long-standing use of torture. Amnesty estimates that there are now up to twenty thousand detainees in Saydnaya, virtually all of them nonviolent demonstrators who never joined the Free Syrian
In 1895, two neurophysiologists issued a book-length report on experiments they had been conducting with a group of young women suffering from a cluster of mysterious ailments. In a series of often dramatic case histories, the authors described the revolutionary new technique they had been using with these patients: listening to them. To be sure, the experiments were not double-blind, the publication wasn't peer-reviewed, and both real and potential conflicts of interest went undisclosed. But the technique showed promise, and one of the report's authors, Sigmund Freud, would go on to gain a
Children's picture books are often our first acquaintance with storytelling. In a board book devoted, say, to trucks, what appears to an adult to be a series of discrete images will, for a preverbal child, provide a narrative: Embedded in the facing images of a pickup and a monster truck is likely a tale of growth and diminishment, or maybe simplification and elaboration. Of course, this is a rough surmise; we can't be sure exactly what's going on inside the kid's head. But we can assume a basic human impulse to look for order and imbue it with meaning. In 1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel,
Kate Zambreno's first novel, O Fallen Angel, published in 2010 and just reissued by Harper Perennial, takes place somewhere between Middle America and hell, if hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously indicated in No Exit, is other people. There certainly seems to be no exit in O Fallen Angel, set in the suburban Midwest in a "Dreamhouse in the country far far away from all the scary city people alright let's just say it in a whisper the scary (black) people they keep on coming closer and closer we keep on moving farther and farther away." Mommy, an archetypal suffocating mother, stays inside and
ONE OF MY MOST MEMORABLE apparitions—the sort cast and staged by a certain ill-tasting mushroom—starred Bullwinkle the moose, who demonstrated his ability to grow his already prominent snout to boa-constrictor length. I can still recall that disturbingly phallic vision nearly forty-five years later. My cartoon grotesque comes to mind as I page through this volume devoted to the hallucinatory drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King. Born in New Zealand in 1951, King became well known in 2008 when her methodically detailed images began to circulate online. The artist, whose earliest work was done