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"I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” That’s how J. D. Vance begins one of this campaign season’s saddest and most fascinating books, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (Harper).
What do you do when you feel you deserve something and you don’t get it? If you’re the narrator of Teddy Wayne’s third novel, a young, white “male whose signifiers [point] to heterosexuality,” you might get carried away and take matters into your own hands.
Loner begins on day one of David Federman’s freshman year at college. He’s a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey who has spent his life until now being unnoticed. During his adolescence he was book smart, and feels that his acceptance to Harvard, where he arrives on the first page with his dowdy suburban-lawyer parents, is an upstaging of the
"YOU CAN TELL I'm a Republican," Janice Areno says as she invites me to sit down in her office. Elephants fill three shelves of a wall opposite her desk. One is blue-and-white porcelain, a second is gold, a third is red, white, and blue and stands near a young child's drawing of a yellow one. One is shaped into a teapot. Another holds an American flag. There are large elephants and small, wooden and glass. There are elephants standing and elephants trotting. Next to her awards for outstanding service to her community and photos of relatives, the elephants had been gathered, over the years, from
In a searing investigation into the once lauded biotech start-up Theranos, Nick Bilton discovers that its precocious founder defied medical experts—even her own chief scientist—about the veracity of its now discredited blood-testing technology.
THE PHRASE AHEAD OF THEIR TIME is often thrown around but almost never accurate or meaningful. There have been only a handful of writers and artists—the likes of Emily Dickinson, Laurence Sterne, Sun Ra, and Van Gogh—whose work became deeply consonant with the culture long after its completion. For instance, Sterne’s metafictional Tristram Shandy is a twentieth-century novel published in the middle of the eighteenth; the compressed grammar and linguistic materiality of Dickinson’s poems still fascinate Language poets. Add to any such list of visionaries the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Born
As almost anyone over age fifty and almost no one under age thirty will remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a small, strange group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA was less an army than a club; it consisted of one black man and fewer than a dozen young white men and women; its most cogently stated aim was to bring “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” At the time of her kidnapping, Hearst was nineteen years old. A granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the real-life Citizen Kane
You are heading into the future on a voyage of sexual discovery, and here is what it’s like. Drinking beers with a man you’ve just met online, you think of five or ten other men you already know and would prefer to drink with, were it not for the grim necessity of finding a boyfriend. At Burning Man, you accompany a relatively attractive guy into the so-called orgy dome, but find only other heterosexuals having sex in neat pairs. At a shoot for a website called Public Disgrace, you join an enthusiastic crowd to watch a cheerful twenty-three-year-old being bound, gagged, and penetrated with a
In his diary, the teenaged Thomas De Quincey once speculated about his persona. “What shall be my character?” he wrote. “Wild—impetuous—splendidly sublime? Dignified—melancholy—gloomily sublime? Or shrouded in mystery—supernatural—like the ‘ancient mariner’—awfully sublime.” De Quincey’s reputation would turn on option number three, although he never gave up on the other alternatives. What is striking about his adolescent query is its suggestion that the author already had a strong sense of where his future might lead. In the same diary, he ingenuously presaged the dreamy, inward focus on the
Since we live in an era of compulsory self-disclosure, there’s no way I can avoid confessing that I read Kristin Dombek’s short book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, in a frenzy of narcissistic injury. The reason is that for the past several years I myself have been working fitfully on a short book about contemporary narcissism (maybe I should say had been working on), except that I kept writing myself into corners and putting it aside. Still, in my own mind I owned the subject, or at least I owned the book-length essay on the subject, meaning I read Dombek’s
In a 2005 essay for the New York Times Magazine, the critic A. O. Scott considered two recent and rather quixotic decisions, made in parallel by rival camps of young writers, to devise print magazines. One was The Believer, inaugurated in 2003 by Dave Eggers’s independent San Francisco publishing house McSweeney’s, and the other was n+1. Where The Believer gave itself over to historical whimsy, n+1 self-consciously styled itself the heir, in its mandarin ambition, to the little politics-and-culture magazines of midcentury. Its founders’ model was the later Partisan Review, a magazine they
The title of disco scholar Tim Lawrence’s new book has taken on a more ominous overtone following the massacre at the nightclub Pulse in Orlando. Of course, the grim reaper alluded to in Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 is not a homophobic terrorist but a disease, AIDS, which scythed a deadly swath through the cast of characters in this absorbing history: performers and artists such as Klaus Nomi, Keith Haring, and Arthur Russell, to name only a few casualties. But Lawrence also means “life and death” in a less literal way: He identifies in club culture a vitalist spirit
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON’S “Breathing Machines,” a sculpture series from the 1960s, are coolly macabre self-portraits—masklike wax replicas of her face, styled with wigs and outfitted with electronics. In Self-Portrait as Albino, 1968, the artist’s expressionless face, eyes closed, is framed by hair like ratty white curtains, secured with a length of frayed silver fabric tied beneath the chin. As the viewer approaches, a motion detector triggers a cassette recording of her breathing. With this unsettling series, Hershman Leeson, who was traumatically confined to an oxygen tent for five weeks in