Gil Scott-Heron, 2010. Years before he died last May at age 62, the legendary poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron had been working on a memoir. Canongate Books, his publisher in Britain, announced plans to publish the book nearly a decade ago, and on the Canongate website there is a spectral recording from the early […]

When Daniel Levin Becker was sixteen, he made a mixtape that included only songs and artists whose names did not contain the letter e. Soon after, he read Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the offending vowel. Levin Becker spent a good part of his formative years “making the numbers and letters on license plates into mathematically true statements,” so he was heartened to discover that he was “not alone in appreciating naturally occurring palindromes, or knowing a shorter sentence with all the letters in the alphabet than The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,

WHAT DOES NOT INITIALLY MEET THE EYE in Richard Mosse’s vivid photographs of cotton-candy hillsides, vamping child soldiers, and rose-hued rebels is the violence of their setting: the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Congo. Located near the border of Rwanda, Kivu has been ground zero for many of the worst atrocities of a civil war […]

LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s […]

Christa Parravani, Charlie, 2004. I felt super proud of myself when I made it all the way to page 3, technically page 1, of Christa Parravani’s memoir her before I Googled “christa parravani.” Parravani, as she immediately reveals in the book, is a photographer whose identical twin sister is dead. But I wanted to know: […]

Yasmine Chatila, Bathroom Girl II (detail), 2007–2008. Rushdie had the Ayatollah, Job had God, and James Lasdun has Nasreen—at least that’s what he calls her in Give Me Everything You Have (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)—the former creative-writing student who harassed him for five years and is apparently still at it. As Lasdun remarks mordantly, […]

Laura Kurgan, New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days Later, 2001, digital print from Ikonos satellite data. On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 emerged from its fourth lunar cycle on the first manned mission to another celestial body. “Oh, my God,” cried astronaut Frank Borman as the spacecraft emerged from the moon’s dark side. “Look […]

If you’re reading this, it’s a safe bet you read magazines. Technically, you may even be reading one now—though I’m not sure if bookforum.com really qualifies. The “.com” might denote precisely what isn’t Bookforum. I’m typing onto a computer screen; you’re reading from one. No trees have been killed. Are we in a magazine? I’m asking because I don’t honestly know.