• print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Top Shelf

    My favorite novel of 2018 is Andrew Martin’s Early Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is smart and scuzzy, bleak and funny, sexy and depressing—and none of that “by turns” shit either. It’s everything all at once, which to me is the hallmark of both its artistry and its authenticity. My favorite nonfiction book of 2018 is Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary (Knopf). It is a pleasure, and moreover an education, to pore over four decades’ worth of Moore’s generous, incisive assessments of Welty, Cheever, Elkin, DeLillo, Beattie, Barthelme, and Roth (among

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Holy Waters

    Like Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It, John Waters arrives with ample mystique preceding him. His inflammatory post-Warhol oeuvre now elicits de rigueur hosannas, and it endures precisely because it boldly went beneath—and beyond—anywhere Pop, camp, conceptual art, or Valley of the Dolls had gone before. Waters synthesized gloriously impure conceptual trash: Sins of the Fleshapoids, dreamy Jean Genet, sassy Paul Lynde, the Chelsea Girls, et al.

    The sleazeballsiness of Pink Flamingos (1972) has assumed canonical stature, and Waters’s comrade-in-harm Divine has achieved the posthumous,

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Lose Your Illusions

    Heather Havrilesky began her writing career in the early days of the internet, first as a columnist at Suck.com and then as a television critic for Salon.com. She has since built an extensive body of work examining American culture’s most insidious messages, perhaps most famously in her popular advice column, “Ask Polly,” in which she helps readers navigate alienation in an era of seemingly endless choice, the false narratives of American success, and the hard work of sustaining meaningful human connection. In her new essay collection, What If This Were Enough? (Doubleday, $26), Havrilesky

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Higher Grounds

    “Of all the modern stimulants, coffee had the greatest hold over Balzac,” Kassy Hayden writes in the afterword to her new translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Modern Stimulants (Wakefield Press, $13), which situates this small, wild book firmly in the social, political, and medical scenes of nineteenth-century France. “Coffee helped him sustain his rigorous writing schedule, and he maintained that it gave him inspiration and fired up his intellect. . . . At times euphoric about his drink of choice, he was more often tormented by the knowledge that, although it contributed to his ill

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    The Root of All Evil

    Five years ago, I edited an anthology of crime stories by women originally published between the early 1940s and the late 1970s. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives carried the subtitle Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense for a specific reason: “Domestic suspense,” as I defined it—though I did not originate the term—referred to a category of crime fiction that did not rest easily within the largely male, American, hard-boiled school created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or in the largely female, British “Golden Age” of detective fiction best represented by Agatha Christie

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Artful Volumes

    James Turrell’s dynamic experiments with light, space, color, and landscape can only be hinted at on the page. Even so, Extraordinary Ideas—Realized (Hatje Cantz, $85) manages to convey much about the artist’s intentions, if not the experience of the work. The volume’s retrospective account begins in 1967 and includes projection pieces (those created by a single beam of light), skyspaces (chambers whose ceilings are open to the sky), ganzfelds (installations that suppress depth perception), and plans and images devoted to the Roden Crater in Arizona, an Earthwork sculpture in which Turrell

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Courtly Love

    In film, no long shot is more iconic, precise in its intention, disturbing, and startling than Alfred Hitchcock’s of a tennis match in Strangers on a Train. The camera looks at the crowd looking intently at a game in action; the crowd mirrors the audience watching the film (the meta Hitchcock loves). In a full grandstand, multiple heads move left, right, left, right, back again, synchronized, following the ball like cats do a swinging object. But only one head, among so many, remains absolutely still, staring straight ahead at the camera. It is that of the malicious mastermind, played by Robert

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    How Does It Feel?

    Late in his memoir, Casey Gerald watches a video of George W. Bush fumbling his way through a story about meeting an underprivileged black youth from South Dallas. The former president’s tale is a version of a familiar narrative, one that Americans trot out as evidence of our society’s fundamentally meritocratic structure: Despite a dead father and an imprisoned mother, despite growing up in the inner-city neighborhood of South Oak Cliff—“you know, on the other side of the Trinity River,” Bush informs us, assuming, correctly, that we all understand the black urban abjection that stems from

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Shill Your Darling

    After decades of obscurity, Eve Babitz—the marvelous polymath of pleasure and gifted annalist of the delights and despair of Los Angeles, where she was born in 1943 and still resides—was suddenly everywhere. The Babitz revival began in early October 2015, with the reissue of her first book, Eve’s Hollywood (1974), the celebrated eight-page dedication of which is dotted with the names of various SoCal demiurges of the 1960s and early ’70s who made up her milieu. They included, among many others, several artists associated with the Ferus Gallery (including Ed Ruscha; Babitz is featured in his

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor by Leslie Umberger

    The detective work in Between Worlds is so engrossing that one may be forgiven for forgetting that the book is also an exhibition catalogue. It accompanies an extensive retrospective, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, of Bill Traylor’s paintings and drawings. Traylor, who died in 1949, is considered one of the most important “folk” or “self-taught” American artists. But this project demonstrates in magisterial manner how his work exceeds these limiting categories.

    Born into slavery, probably in 1853, Traylor was a farm laborer in the area between Selma and Montgomery,

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Two Mississippi

    The tragedy of the formative opening episode in Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy, is an American one, never more identifiably so. I’m writing this on the first day of October 2018, and last week millions of us watched the hours of retraumatizing and indignant testimony concerning an episode nearly identical to Heavy’s opening scenario. A fifteen-year-old girl, wearing her one-piece bathing suit under her clothes, is tricked into a bedroom with boys who are seventeen and bigger than her. There is laughter, among other sounds. They close the door. She cannot leave. Across from the closed door is a

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2019

    Gang of Five

    On March 6, 2015, just before International Women’s Day, authorities in cities around China rounded up feminist activists to preempt a planned public demonstration. The women were sent to a detention center in Beijing, where they were held for over a month on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” While in custody, the activists were isolated from friends and family, subjected to constant interrogation, and deprived of medical care. Their offense? A plan to distribute anti-sexual-harassment stickers on public transportation. “Had they not been jailed, their activities likely would

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