Last spring, Wired magazine ran a mini-feature on how to make small talk. The tone was that of a pep talk, the advice poignantly remedial. The overall effect was to make the heart bleed for the presumed social ineptitude of the magazine’s tech-savvy readers.
Mark Gluth’s The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis is a short novel with a fractured narrative structure, but it is also a complete and awe-inspiring text, offering an acute and moving portrayal of grief’s powers. Opening with a disquieting scene about the reclusive writer of the title, as she is working on her final story, the book sets the stage for what it then becomes: an enchanted network of artists, tragedies, reveries, and mise-en-abymes built from a raging desire to rewrite mortality. Each page evokes the traumatic nature of loss and the stunning fact that life goes on when others
When I was an elementary and junior-high school student in Arizona in the 1970s, the school lunch calendar was always a harbinger of fun meals to come: made-from-scratch Salisbury steak, baked chicken, spaghetti with meatballs, or tamale pie ladled out by smiling lunch ladies in hairnets and washed down with little cartons of fresh-tasting, ice-cold whole milk. We all got a lot of exercise back then; I was always hungry. I ate everything on my tray, even the peas, carrots, corn, or (God forbid) brussels sprouts, and I passionately loved the fresh-baked rolls and brownies, the Mississippi mud cake. The
Robin D.G. Kelley’s new biography performs the essential and gratifying task of transforming a deliberately enigmatic eccentric—”I like to stand out, man. I’m not one of the crowd”—into a warm, familiar, flesh-and-blood presence. Kelley emphasizes that the chapeau-sporting genius who wrote “Nutty” was at bottom a devoted husband and father rooted in a social network dating back to his childhood on West 63rd Street in Manhattan, where he moved from North Carolina at age four in 1922. There Monk lived—except for two teen years in a gospel roadshow and a few sojourns with relatives in the Bronx—until he retreated to
“A Noiseless Flash” is how journalist John Hersey titled the first chapter of Hiroshima, his much-praised 1946 account of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Though witnesses some twenty miles away claimed that the explosion was as loud as thunder, none of the survivors interviewed by Hersey recalled hearing “any noise of the bomb.” Rather, they experienced a blinding flash of light and sudden swells of pressure.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s wonderfully stylized new novel, “Running Away,” begins with a question: “Would it ever end with Marie?” That’s only fitting for a book that leaves so much unanswered — we never learn the narrator’s name or occupation or, indeed, why his relationship with Marie, his Parisian girlfriend, is tanking. Those aren’t the only riddles, either.
What is art education and what should it do? The essays that Steven Henry Madoff has assembled in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) explore this often-controversial question and attempt to determine how to educate people to become professional artists. Madoff is the Senior Critic at Yale University’s School of Art. Art School emerges from symposia that he conducted over a five-year period. Thirty prominent artists and educators contributed essays that assess, approve, and in some cases decry the purposes and pedagogy of contemporary formal art studies.
Drawing on the tradition of fanciful collage practiced by such poets as John Ashbery, David Shapiro, and Joe Brainard, Brandon Downing wields his own scissors to cut a distinctive patch within this New York School specialty. Other influences—Charles Henri Ford and Tom Phillips—may also be in evidence, but Downing’s assuredly contemporary sensibility marks both his choice of images and his orchestration of texts. Familiar visuals like those lifted from ’50s- and ’60s-era postcards, magazine ads, and grade school textbooks mix provocatively with rarer fare—a World War II plane-spotting guide, a stock certificate, and yellowed pages from a nineteenth-century book about
As Ernesto Cardenal asserts in Incantations, poetry has a wider latitude for power in a culture where it is understood to be “the first speech.” It proposes joyfully that what’s read this afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club shares a magical link to this book’s poems by illiterate women in Chiapas. The urgency of such a connection (for them and for us) is what animates for me this inaccrochable collection of poems by Mayan women.
Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is the world’s foremost creator of “comics journalism”—a contemporary field he basically invented. His previous books, including Palestine—for which Sacco interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict—record, sometimes in minute detail, what is absent from the flash of news reports: the texture of lives on the ground. Sacco doesn’t flinch when depicting some of the most atrocious episodes in recent global history; in Safe Area Gorazde, his extraordinary volume on Bosnia, he presents intricately rendered drawings of mass graves. Sacco, who was himself born to a Catholic family in Malta, is
Robert Walser’s prose exudes fluorescence, if words on the page can be described as color. His protagonists have such brightly sharpened tastes and manners, and such blindingly astute observational skills that to read their ways of seeing is as enlightening, and at times as painful, as staring into the sun. Reading Walser fortifies me to notice, to study, and to transform into art those moments that I hope never come. But come they will, Simon Tanner notices repeatedly in Walser’s first novel, The Tanners, published in Switzerland in 1907 but only recently translated into English. “Long live misfortune!” he toasts.
When the shortlist for this year’s National Book Award in poetry was announced, the odds-on favorite, Frederick Seidel’s Poems: 1959-2009, was nowhere to be found. Bill Knott raised the alarm on his blog, “Critically acclaimed as the book of the year, and…it’s not even on the NBA shortlist—what’s with that?” Meanwhile, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, the editors of Harper’s and n+1 got together to organize protests and sloganeer. (“Where the hell is Fred Seidel?” they painted on their placards. “Hey, hey, NBA, which rich poet didja spurn today?”)
Stewardship of the land remains as contentious an issue today as it was one hundred years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt laid out his vision for conservation and ran into opposition from corporate lumber and mining interests. In The Big Burn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan tells the story of Roosevelt’s prophetic vision for America’s landscape and the debates he gleefully exacerbated. The book focuses, with cinematic flair, on the August 1910 forest fire that ravaged three million acres in the northern Rockies, while providing an opportune challenge to the newborn US Forest Service.
Earlier this decade, prompted by a lawsuit his father was facing, photographer Mitch Epstein returned to his western Massachusetts hometown. Holyoke had become an unfamiliar landscape in the years since he had left as a young man, so he decided to document the changed circumstances of his parents’ lives. The resultant photographs and video installations in the series “Family Business” can be understood as an attempt to render visual the tectonic social and economic shifts the United States has undergone since midcentury. American Power, Epstein’s new book, attempts something similar, but on a much broader scale. He began with a
Jason Quinn Malott’s debut, The Evolution of Shadows, is a devastating, often dizzying novel of returns and turnarounds. Years after war photographer Gray Banick vanishes in Bosnia, his American, English, and Bosnian friends convene in Sarajevo to solve the mystery of his disappearance, a venture that sends them traveling around the country, seeking hints of him or his remains. Malott’s characters rarely stay in a single timeframe—or a single place—for long: they slip frequently into recollections of lovers and dinners and battles past, making their experience of the present seem just as bumpy, as prone to stalling and sliding backward,
With so many books about Andy Warhol already in print, one can reasonably ask why yet another should make its appearance now. What more can really be said about a man—and a mythos—that all but defined modern-day media culture? From the early assembly-line silk screens of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor through the manufactured celebrity of latter-day It Girl Edie Sedgwick to the machinations behind the partnership with proto-punk darlings the Velvet Underground—all these stories have been told so frequently that it’s difficult to distinguish truth from fairy tale.
Music has been made by means of technology for nearly as long, if not exactly as long, as music has been made. Except for the voice (as well as the effects of clapping, slapping, and snapping), the sounds we agree to designate as musical rely on the use of tools, whether those tools be sticks, synthesizers, banjoes, electric guitars, or flutes carved from the bones of whales. The contemporary question of what kinds of music rank as technologically borne, then, is less a matter of provenance and more a matter of what kinds of sounds—and what types of tools—we choose
Did Patricia Highsmith and Susan Sontag ever meet? According to Joan Schenkar’s lively biography of the suspense writer, it seems the closest encounter the two ever had was in 1976, during Highsmith’s second visit to Berlin, where she heard Allen Ginsberg read his poetry and Sontag present a thirty-page paper about a recent trip to China: “Pat carried away with approval only Sontag’s firm declaration that she didn’t and wouldn’t belong to any writers’ group.” (Well, at least until Sontag became president of PEN American Center in 1989.) Had they actually met, these two women—whose (open) secret lives have become
Few things herald the end of a subculture like the book-length critical study. Yet it’s thrilling to see zines taken seriously in Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines, which explores the world of handmade magazines created by women as a kind of social activism. The idea of an academic treatise on “grrrl zines”—grrrl with its triple r referring to the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s—is probably what compels Andi Zeisler, a founder of feminist magazine Bitch, to warn humorously in the foreword that “it can be difficult to talk today about the impact of the medium without giving off a whiff
Corporations are struggling in the new millennium to connect with consumers. After all, as we’ve been told over and over again, in the brave new branded world of marketing, business is no longer about selling products or attracting customers; it’s about forging personal relationships. Grant McCracken realized that “the days of a simple-minded marketing, of finding and pushing ‘hot buttons’—these days were over.” And so he conceived the Chief Culture Officer—the eponymous hero of his new book—who “has the weather maps” for the “North Sea [of culture] out of which commotion constantly storms.” The CCO provides a “deeper, slower knowledge”
