Welcome to the Fall 2023 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, our contributors review new novels by Ed Park, J. M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Lexi Freiman, and more. Also in this edition: Katie Kadue reads scene stealer and meme factory Julia Fox’s memoir; Hanif Abdurraqib writes about obsession, mythology, and Will Hermes’s new biography of Lou Reed; Audrey Wollen considers Helen Garner’s newly reissued 1984 novel The Children’s Bach; Laura Kipnis reads Janet Malcolm’s posthumous confessional memoir; Jane Hu surveys Sigrid Nunez’s quietly defiant fiction; and so much more.

We hope you

WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. 

Which brings me to Janet

IN THE AWARDS-SWEEPING 2021 documentary Summer of Soul, a man named Darryl Lewis recalls his first Sly and the Family Stone encounter, at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. In those days, he says, “When you saw a Black group, what you expected to see was, generally speaking, all men, all dressed in matching suits, ready even before they hit the stage to perform.” But here, Sly and company “kind of saunter out,” men and women, Black and white, a living quilt of psychedelic patterns, knit caps, and sundry frippery. “The instruments weren’t tuned,” Lewis says. “You wonder, What are they doing

LAST YEAR, THE FIRST Chinese American movie star was saddled with yet another pioneering honorific: Anna May Wong became the first actress to have the figurative currency of her face made literal, minted on a US quarter. This star, born on silver nitrate, found an afterlife in copper-nickel. I can think of no wrier fate for someone trailed by so much ornamental simile, most often compared to things: Wong’s ex-lover Eric Maschwitz thought her “a piece of porcelain”; Walter Benjamin called her a “chinoiserie specimen” and likened her name to “full moons in a bowl of tea.” I am doing laundry the

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with The Face magazine, songwriter-producer Jack Antonoff—who has counted Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde in his enviable stable—went on a rant against the NYC scene in general and Dimes Square specifically. “Well, what’s the export?” he asked. “What’s the book, what’s the band?” 

Good question! For books, one could do worse than those of Natasha Stagg, a cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same. She is so plugged in that she nearly titled her new book Name Dropping, as she warns us up front: “one of my favorite pastimes, you’ll see.” Coming to

BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killin’ it,”