• review • May 15, 2015

    Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars by Chris Woods

    Arthur Holland Michel

    One of the many unnamed intelligence officials quoted in Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars declares that the drone is “the most precise weapon in the history of warfare.” It is a claim that’s repeated throughout the book. For General David Deptula, who oversaw the Air Force drone program in its early years, this aerial tool represents a radical departure from “the industrial age of warfare,” when pilots would simply drop thousands of unguided tons of ordinance in the general direction of their targets. Drones, which can loiter over a target for days, if not weeks, are

    Read more
  • review • May 10, 2015

    The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell

    Jane Yong Kim

    FOX News pundits yelling about grounding flights from Africa to stop Ebola from spreading to the United States would be in good company in Carola Dibbell’s gleaming and disaster-ridden debut novel. Set in New York City in the near future, The Only Ones calibrates a new normal based on surging of distrust. A pandemic has swept the globe, killing millions, and like aftershocks, pathogens continue to wreak havoc. Mothers hide their children in public toilets to avoid quarantines. People run not only from viruses but also from vaccination drives. A neighbor is someone who could report you for not

    Read more
  • review • April 27, 2015

    The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry

    Melissa Holbrook Pierson

    Is the phrase “a farce set in art school” redundant? Cate Dicharry’s first novel takes that view, and while this position could easily be insufferable as well as unnecessary—hitting the broad side of a barn is not exactly a daring challenge—she makes it an unvarnished delight. This is an especially wise authorial move given how well-worked a genre the campus novel is—and how brave or even foolhardy it is to follow the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Yet contrary to the opinion of some (“Last rites for the campus novel”), the genre is not over, or even near over. Like

    Read more
  • review • April 16, 2015

    The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy

    Grayson Clary

    Since the invention of messianism, every generation, regular as clockwork, wonders if it might be the last. History is planted thick with prophets of the end times: John of Patmos, David Koresh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Some make for better reading than others.

    Mass death and destruction are unfortunate, but fiction writers find them nifty all the same. And if the last few years have seen an especially strong renaissance of apocalyptic literature, Benjamin Percy’s impressive new outing, The Dead Lands, takes the form into its mannerist phase. Loosely adapting Lewis and Clark’s journey west, the

    Read more
  • excerpt • April 10, 2015
    Dennis Cooper

    Dennis Cooper's Haunted HTML Novel

    Paige K. Bradley

    Dennis Cooper's latest book, Zac’s Haunted House, was released online in mid-January by the Paris-based small press and label Kiddiepunk. Dubbed an “html novel” and offered as a free download, it consists of seven html files, each of which expands into a long, vertical scroll of animated gifs. You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet's soul. It has just a few words—the chapter titles and a few subtitles embedded in some of the gifs—but it still very clearly belongs to Cooper’s own haunted oeuvre,

    Read more
  • review • April 09, 2015

    On Comics and Critique in Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul

    Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

    A TRAUMATIC EVENT is one that defies our ability to tell what happened and at the same time sets off the desperate compulsion to do so, or at least to try, over and over, however awkward, until a story begins to take hold. A sharp, sudden eruption of violence—a war, an explosion, an attack—both does damage and repairs, by triggering the impulse to explain it, assign it meaning, and make it fit within the wider story we tell ourselves about the worlds in which we live.

    Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a critic based in Beirut.

    Read more
  • review • April 01, 2015

    Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo

    Becca Rothfeld

    The work of Argentine author Silvina Ocampo is rife with unlikely marriages, deadly weddings, and botched birthdays. Ocampo’s funerals are cheerful, her fêtes funereal. “The cemetery looked like a flower show, and the streets sounded like a bell-ringing contest,” she writes of a funeral procession in “Friends,” one of the stories in the newly translated collection Thus Were Their Faces. The mourners “were so enraged they looked happy. On [the] white coffin they had put bright flowers, which were constantly praised by the women…. I don’t think anyone cried.” In another story, “The Photographs,”

    Read more
  • print • Apr/May 2015
    David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988–89, gelatin silver print, 20 × 24". From “Sex Series (for Marion Scemama),” 1988–89.

    David Wojnarowicz’s Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

    Olivia Laing

    ALMOST TWENTY YEARS after his death, David Wojnarowicz returned to public view. His renaissance began in 2010, with the uproar that followed the Smithsonian’s banning of his film Fire in My Belly, and continued in 2012, with the publication of Cynthia Carr’s remarkable biography. Now, Aperture’s twentieth-anniversary, expanded edition of Brush Fires shines a welcome light back on Wojnarowicz’s work itself, providing a compelling history of his photographic practice. An artist, writer, and AIDS activist, Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was also a dazzlingly inventive photographer. In fact, photography

    Read more
  • print • Apr/May 2015

    Portrait of an I

    A volume of e-mail correspondence sheds new light on Kathy Acker’s work and life • Elizabeth Gumport

    Kathy Acker met media theorist McKenzie Wark in 1995, when Acker was on tour in Australia. A novelist, essayist, and performance artist, Acker first made a name for herself in the New York art world of the 1970s, achieving widespread notoriety in 1984 when a mainstream press published the thrilling, anarchic novel Blood and Guts in High School. Acker was widely regarded as both inheritor and innovator of the literary avant-garde, and like many of her later books, Blood and Guts in High School appropriated text and themes from classic works, filtering them through the voices of multiple

    Read more
  • print • Apr/May 2015
    From left: Unknown artist, Yvette Mimieux, ca. 1960–70, mixed media on Polaroid print, 3 1/4 × 4 1/4". Unknown artist, Elizabeth Taylor, ca. 1960–70, mixed media on Polaroid print, 3 1/4 × 4 1/4".

    Type 42: Fame Is the Name of the Game

    Albert Mobilio

    IN THE SPRING OF 2012, artist Jason Brinkerhoff found a cache of some 950 Polaroids devoted to television images from the 1960s and early ’70s. The photos—the book’s title takes its name from a popular Polaroid film stock, Type 42—gathered in this sampling from that collection are mostly of actresses appearing on what is probably a modest-size black-and-white television. Each actress has been shot during a close-up, and her name (whether famous, or quite obscure) has been inked on the snapshot’s border. Although attempts to trace the archive back to its creator have proved fruitless, a few

    Read more
  • print • Apr/May 2015

    Revolutionary Road

    A biography of Karl Marx’s youngest daughter speaks to the dilemmas of our own age • Karen Olsson

    It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era social-reform

    Read more
  • print • Apr/May 2015
    Frank Sinatra performing with Jan Savitt, 1943.

    Roll Over, Cole Porter

    How the American music industry weathered the rock revolution • Ted Gioia

    Something strange and wild happened in American popular music during the middle of the 1950s. You can almost identify the precise date when the change took place. Rock ’n’ roll certainly existed before Elvis Presley reached the top of the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel” in the spring of 1956, but it didn’t yet dominate the airwaves. Dean Martin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Nelson Riddle had each enjoyed No. 1 singles in the preceding months. But Elvis’s success changed the rules of the music business; during the remainder of the decade (and for years to come), most of the rising stars were rock

    Read more