• review • April 21, 2022

    Net Loss

    The first four nodes of ARPANET—the Department of Defense’s primeval internet—were connected in 1969, the very year that Theodor W. Adorno died. In retrospect, it seems a cruel coincidence; it is difficult to imagine a cultural technology more deserving of Adorno’s truculent analysis than the internet, or to locate a comparable living thinker able to explain why a worldwide network that was supposed to unite everyone and improve everything tremors with feelings of disconnection and debasement.

    The beginning of Justin E. H. Smith’s new book reads as if it might deliver this lost critique, given

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  • excerpt • March 08, 2022

    An excerpt from Body Work on memoir, love, and writing to find a new narrative

    There is a conventional wisdom about memoir that claims a writer must have sufficient hindsight in order to write meaningfully about her past. This has not been my experience. All that has been required of me to write about something is this change of heart. A shift toward, or away, or perhaps a desire to return to some truer version of myself. I don’t even have to know that I’ve made it, but when I look back at the beginnings of everything I’ve ever written, there it is. 

    I recently reread Natasha Trethewey’s exquisite memoir, Memorial Drive, in which she explores her mother’s murder by an

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  • review • March 01, 2022

    Our spring issue is online now!

    Welcome to the Mar/Apr/May 2022 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, our contributors review new novels by Sheila Heti, Alejandro Zambra, Claire-Louise Bennett, and more, as well as newly reissued works by Kay Dick and Yūko Tsushima. The film critic A. S. Hamrah considers how director Billy Wilder bested the twentieth century, Sasha Frere-Jones reflects on essayist Lucy Sante’s inquisitive oeuvre, Harmony Holiday writes about the late hip-hop producer J Dilla’s poetics, and so much more. Read the issue online here, and consider signing up for or gifting a subscription.

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Day Trip

    FROM CÉZANNE’S APPLES TO LOIS DODD’S CLOTHESLINES, the quotidian world, with its domestic scenes and unremarkable landscapes, has long inspired artists. Their scrupulously focused attention can yield surprising insights about ordinary things—the geography of shadings on an apple, the dance of towels hung out to dry. Mamma Andersson, whose recent retrospective at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, is documented in this exhibition catalogue, also delights in the mundane. Whether depicting a kitchen sink, linen closet, or cluttered desk, Andersson imbues her subjects with an engrossing

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Some Like It Fraught

    IN AUGUST 1945, THREE MONTHS AFTER ADOLF HITLER’S SUICIDE in the bunker and the Allied victory in Europe, the Hollywood film director Billy Wilder arrived in Berlin. Wilder’s film Double Indemnity, that pinnacle of film noir, had come out the previous summer to great acclaim and box office success. The Lost Weekend, Wilder’s next film, equally dark and also a future classic, was being readied for fall release at Paramount. Now Wilder had been enlisted by the US Office of War Information to return to the city he’d fled in 1933, when he was forced out of screenwriting because he was a Jew. The

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    The Naked and the Dead

    IN 1998, Lucy Sante published The Factory of Facts, a memoir of her childhood in Belgium and the Sante family’s stuttering moves back and forth (and finally forth) to the States—ultimately, to Summit, New Jersey—when she was eight, in 1962. Toward the end of the memoir, she marks her story as a displacement, “as if I were writing about someone else.” Sante is talking, here, about the French of her youth contrasted with the English of America, and how “languages are not equivalent one to another.” Something else is in play, though. The eight-year-old boy that Sante speaks for would need to

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Love, Labor, Loss

    EARLY ON, I WROTE A FACETIOUS POEM, a “Love-in-the-time-of-Corona” version of a Frank O’Hara classic and merrily posted it on Facebook. I know it began, “Having a Quarantine With You / is more fun than going to the supermarket or taking public transport,” but I can’t remember the rest because, not long after, I deleted it out of embarrassment. In a world where suddenly thousands were dying by the day, the vibe was seriously off. Much like the last squirt of Purell, whatever flimsy novelty the novel coronavirus offered evaporated pretty much instantaneously. If we were posting poetry, only

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    First Person Plural

    TO TELL THE STORY of another person’s life poses certain challenges to an author wanting to capture their subject in the truest light possible. In the introduction to her ebullient, poignant What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle, Nicole Rudick offers up her strategy for honest representation: “What could be closer to the artist’s voice than the artist’s own voice, closer to her sensibility than that produced by her own hand?” Rudick edited this hybrid volume of text and images, selecting and sequencing Saint Phalle’s own writings and works on paper

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Man of the Midcentury

    IF FRENCH MODERNISM IS RATIONAL, Italian modernism sensual, German modernism ideological, and Danish modernism comfortable, what’s American modernism? I’d say it’s Danish. That’s because of Jens Risom, the Danish-born and -trained designer who, twenty-three years old on the eve of World War II, boarded a freighter bound for New York. There, according to Vicky Lowry in Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table, the first monograph on his work, the young man “quickly discovered that there wasn’t really any interesting contemporary American furniture to study and learn from”—an exaggeration, maybe, but it’s

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Swinging on a Star

    THRALL IS A JEFFERSONIAN WORD. In Constructing a Nervous System, the critic Margo Jefferson is enthralled by or to: her mother, her father, Bing Crosby. She suspects Condoleezza Rice is enthralled by or to George W. Bush, and Ike Turner by or to “manic depression and drug addiction, to years of envy,  . . . to a Mississippi childhood that was a trifecta of domestic abuse, sexual treachery and racist violence.” A young James Baldwin enthralled the Harlem faithful. Nina Simone refused the thrall of “warring desires.” It’s the last that clarifies the stakes. Thrall, some time after it meant “slave”

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Look Back in Anger

    ONCE UPON A TIME, humans lived in small, nomadic, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then, several thousand years ago, they domesticated plants and animals, discovered agriculture, and grew sedentary, eventually erecting cities, which gave rise to civilization—emperors, taxes, public works, the DMV. This was either a good thing (Hobbes) or a bad thing (Rousseau).

    So the story goes; maybe you heard it in college. Anthropologists and archaeologists have understood for decades it’s not true. James C. Scott summed up what we now know of early humanity in Against the Grain (2017): “It turns

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  • print • Mar/Apr/May 2022

    Artful Volumes

    Houston native Jamal Cyrus calls his artistic mentor Terry Adkins a “cerebral artist with soul.” The same description could be applied to Cyrus himself, whose cross-disciplinary artworks often excavate under-known Black cultural histories. JAMAL CYRUS: THE END OF MY BEGINNING (Inventory Press/Blaffer Art Museum, $35), Cyrus’s first monograph, accompanies his midcareer solo exhibition of the same name. The understated title is borrowed from a sculptural installation from 2005, in which Cyrus adorned a miniature suburban landscape with mounds of snowlike Afro hair. As the exhibition’s cocurator

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