Daily Review

You Say You Want an Evolution
By A. S. Hamrah
Summer 2018
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was not a flop when it came out. It was a big hit and ended up the highest-grossing film of 1968. It was especially popular with acidheads and pot smokers, science geeks, budding filmmakers, and people under forty in general. The critics in New York, however, all hated it (except for Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker), and it had not done well in preview screenings with studio execs and celebrities, who found it boring and confusing. Those preview screenings and early reviews have become part of the film’s legend. People love to remember how the snobs got it wrong.
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal:
A Novel
by Dorthe Nors
Graywolf Press
$16.00 List Price
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Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors
By Andrew Schenker
web exclusive
The women in Dorthe Nors’s books are perpetually adrift. Approaching middle age, often coming off breakups, unhappy in their work, they fit in neither in the urban bustle of Copenhagen, where they’ve spent the majority of their adult lives, nor in the rural Jutland of their childhoods. They lack a

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In the Fascist Weight Room
By Elizabeth Schambelan
Summer 2018
Half a century ago, when Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel was published, reasonable people the world over were entertaining the possibility that a global Marxist revolution really was at hand. Naturally, not everyone was enthused about the prospect.
Breaking the Waves
By Charlotte Shane
Summer 2018
IN JANUARY, I received a package containing one twenty-dollar bill and one postcard with “thanks for being a part of the Wild Iris!” handwritten on the back, punctuated by a heart. The Wild Iris was a feminist bookstore—“Florida’s only feminist bookstore,” according to its website—and it was newly

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The Space Barons:
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
PublicAffairs
$28.00 List Price
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The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport
By Ken Kalfus
Apr/May 2018
February’s test launch of Elon Musk’s new Falcon Heavy rocket was probably the most expensive and most glorious publicity stunt in the history of advertising: flame and smoke, and then videos of the space-suited mannequin in the cherry-red Tesla Roadster, David Bowie on the stereo, Hitchhiker’s “

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In a Day?s Work:
The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America?s Most Vulnerable Workers
by Bernice Yeung
The New Press
$25.99 List Price
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In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung
By Alex Press
Apr/May 2018
While #MeToo has exposed the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in a handful of high-profile industries, its priorities have so far reflected broader social hierarchies, giving outsize attention to the experiences of a privileged minority. In a Day’s Work shows us what harassment looks like outside

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The Mars Room:
A Novel
by Rachel Kushner
Scribner
$27.00 List Price
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Of Infamous Women
By Sasha Frere-Jones
Apr/May 2018
What happens when you’re removed from the scrum of history, when you can’t change anything beyond your immediate experience? That’s one of the questions wiring The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner’s third novel. Her first two novels swim in historical events—Telex from Cuba finds two Americans riding the wave of Castro’s ascension, and The Flamethrowers maps one American artist’s flight through the clouds of Italy and New York in the 1970s—but The Mars Room boils history down to a nubbin.
The Pisces:
A Novel
by Melissa Broder
Hogarth
$25.00 List Price
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The Pisces by Melissa Broder
By Lauren O'Neill-Butler
web exclusive
Melissa Broder’s 2016 book of contemplative essays, So Sad Today, revolves around her chronic depression and the anxieties and illnesses that attend it. Exhilaratingly, she is willing to truly let it all hang out, charges of “narcissism” be damned. In one passage from the book, she discusses the “

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Charlotte Salomon:
Life? or Theatre? A Selection of 450 Gouaches
by Judith C. E. Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch
Taschen America
$35.00 List Price
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Life? or Theatre? and Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? A Selection of 450 Gouaches. by Charlotte Salomon
By Jennifer Krasinski
Apr/May 2018
Origin stories are woven with many threads: Some we spin ourselves, while others we inherit. The great German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) accounted for herself—for who she was, and why she was, and where she came from—not by wondering what of herself was fact and what was fiction. Rather,

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No Ashes in the Fire:
Coming of Age Black and Free in America
by Darnell L Moore
Nation Books
$26.00 List Price
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A Neutral Innocence of the Heart
By Dawn Lundy Martin
Apr/May 2018
Picture the carefree swagger of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging himself into a pristine tree-lined body of water from a rope as if there were no history, no context, no world. Instead, simply the body and the self it manages, flying gracefully with no net, nothing to carry that body to safety but its own faith that nothing will squash it down.
Fair Game
By Christopher Lyon
POV
On a steamy Friday afternoon that felt more like late July than mid-September, I headed to the annual New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, aiming to learn more about the state of independent art publishing. Run by Printed Matter, the nonprofit organization that promotes artists’ books with evangelical zeal, the fair is now in

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On Joan Didion
By Miranda Popkey
POV
I “She cooked nonstop,” Eve Babitz, the Los Angeles–based artist and author of Eve’s Hollywood, remembers. “She made stuff like beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for thirty-five people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. . . . It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. . .

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Hearing Voices
By Tobi Haslett
POV
Last month, part of the street I live on was renamed “Do the Right Thing Way,” after the Spike Lee Joint. It’s a taunting slap to this little strip of gentrifying Brooklyn. Do the Right Thing, which was shot a few blocks from my building, is a film about racial hatred and police slaughter, but

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Will the Real American Psycho Please Stand Up: Why Donald Trump Was Patrick Bateman’s Hero
By Dan Duray
POV
Recently, I had cause to reread Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 bestseller American Psycho. A lot has been said about this controversial comic novel’s violence, but I think it’s best classified with social satire like Vile Bodies or Speedboat (just with, you know, a homicidal narrator). And as it turns out, despite its twenty-four years, some

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Neoliberalizing Liberal Education
By Jim Sleeper
POV
A good liberal education has three dimensions—learning, teaching, and citizenship building—each of which the journalist Fareed Zakaria has mishandled enough in his own academic career so that he misrepresents them for the rest of us in In Defense of a Liberal Education. I review that book in Bookforum’s summer issue, but before the predictable coronation gets too far along, here

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Daily Review

By A. S. Hamrah

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal:

A Novel

by Dorthe Nors

Graywolf Press

$16.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Andrew Schenker

By Elizabeth Schambelan

By Charlotte Shane

The Space Barons:

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport

PublicAffairs

$28.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Ken Kalfus

In a Day?s Work:

The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America?s Most Vulnerable Workers

by Bernice Yeung

The New Press

$25.99 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Alex Press

The Mars Room:

A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

Scribner

$27.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Sasha Frere-Jones

The Pisces:

A Novel

by Melissa Broder

Hogarth

$25.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Charlotte Salomon:

Life? or Theatre? A Selection of 450 Gouaches

by Judith C. E. Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch

Taschen America

$35.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Jennifer Krasinski

No Ashes in the Fire:

Coming of Age Black and Free in America

by Darnell L Moore

Nation Books

$26.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Dawn Lundy Martin

By Christopher Lyon

By Miranda Popkey

By Tobi Haslett

By Dan Duray

By Jim Sleeper

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble