• review • November 29, 2022

    Welcome to the Dec/Jan/Feb 2023 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, read: Harmony Holiday on Hilton Als’s conflicted love letter to Prince; Justin Taylor on whether Cormac McCarthy is “our most minor major novelist or is he our most major minor novelist”; Christine Smallwood on a new biography of Shirley Hazzard; Becca Rothfeld on Colette’s Chéri novels and the mantle of girlhood; George Saunders interviewed by Angelo Hernandez-Sias; Siobhan Phillips on choreographer George Balanchine and the fragile contingency of genius; Lisa Borst on Sam Lipsyte’s 1990s neopunk noir novel; Rebecca Ariel

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Pierre Fatumbi Verger: United States of America 1934 & 1937

    BORN IN 1902, Pierre Verger became a successful photojournalist in his native France, in 1934 cofounding an agency whose members included the likes of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He lived mainly in Brazil from 1946 until his death fifty years later, and in his adopted country devoted himself to ethnography, writing many books. But he was not a disinterested observer; fascinated by the persistence of Yoruba culture in the New World, he was initiated into the Candomblé religion, and after studying in Benin, he became a Babalaô or high priest of the Ifá oracle, and was accorded the new

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Cold Comforts

    SHIRLEY HAZZARD WAS BORN in Sydney, Australia, in 1931. She was the second daughter of Reg and Kit, who met while working in the office of the engineering company that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Theirs was a marriage marked, as Brigitta Olubas puts it in Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, by an “almost lifelong incompatibility” made more difficult by Reg’s alcoholism and Kit’s bipolarity. Shirley was Kit’s favorite. When she was six or seven years old, Kit asked her to come to the kitchen so they could together put their heads into the gas oven. Shirley later said that the character Dora

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Corps Values

    A QUICK GLANCE at the facts of George Balanchine’s life suggests that he was destined to be a great choreographer. Born in 1904, he studied at what was then the most important ballet academy in the world, the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg; in the ’20s, he made dances in Europe for what was then the most important company in the world, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; by midcentury, in the United States and with his own troupe, he would finish creating what is still probably the most important choreographic canon in the world, Balanchine’s ballets. But Jennifer Homans’s new biography

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Wear and Tear

    AS A CHILD, I dreamed I would one day become a fashion designer. It’s one of those gigs, like astronaut or firefighter, that seems fun until you get too old to overlook the occupational hazards. For fashion, the dangers have long been hidden. In recent years, news coverage of “fast fashion,” a deceptively light term for cheaply manufactured clothing that pollutes landfills and oceans while exploiting and endangering workers, has proliferated—while solutions have not. The disconnect is understandable though hardly excusable: consumers look to material goods to change the way they feel, and

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Cut to the Chase

    IN A TEACHING MANUAL she wrote in the 1980s, the artist Sybil Andrews stressed the importance of reaching into an image for its essence, stripping away whatever stagnated it. “Can you catch that? Can you get that sense of movement?” she would ask. The advice revealed a design philosophy that had defined her work for decades: her 1931 linocut In Full Cry shows a row of horses leaping over a hedge, their riders’ coattails soaring behind them. The lines themselves are Andrews’s subject, vigorous and unflinching. “I don’t draw the horse jumping,” she said. “I draw the jump.”

    Jenny Uglow’s new

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Party Favor

    LAST WEEKEND I WENT to a party where people were wearing black lipstick, tropical shirts, chokers, and little drink umbrellas behind their ears. That was because the theme was “Hot Topic in the Tropics.” Many of the same people had recently been at another party where we danced on an Astroturf rooftop at a house rumored to be owned by the daughter of a famous dead novelist where there was a bathtub full of beers. Most of us had met at a succession of parties held in different cities over the course of more than a decade: birthday parties, magazine parties, dinner parties, parties where all we

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Director’s Cut

    IT IS MY FAULT and only mine if I keep Gordon Matta-Clark as a personal Jesus, but the story flies. Matta-Clark died, way too early, at the age of thirty-five in 1978, and spent a chunk of his time slicing up abandoned buildings, which is very Jesus-y. One of his building cuts has become a permanent part of Manhattan’s west side—of that, more soon—and he even contributed to New York’s proudest category of impermanence: the restaurant. (RIP Food, Soho, 1971–1989.) Matta-Clark was tuned to frequencies prophetic in nature and number: the glow of decay, the need to befriend ghosts, and the spiritual

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Be Loyal to the Royal in Yourself

    WHO WAS BUNNY MELLON? A photo caption in the opening pages of the new book I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise: A Life of Bunny Mellon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40), by her erstwhile ghostwriter-cum-biographer Mac Griswold, describes her simply as “icon and woman.” More specifically, Mellon was a lifestyle pioneer, for whom the domestic space—the garden and home, with its antiques and art, but also its mood, energy, and ambience—was a Gesamtkunstwerk. She didn’t simply throw parties, she transported guests into ephemeral realms. As a mentor and bestie to First Lady Jackie Kennedy, she helped

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    The Lit Parade

    JEREMIAH MOSS’s FERAL CITY concerns the summer of 2020, when after covid’s devastating first pass through New York City and the consequent exodus of everyone who could afford it, an invisible city rose up. The poor, the young, the nonwhite, the queer, the marginal were its constituents, and they made full use of public spaces in which they would otherwise be surveilled and policed. They made art on the plywood masks worn by fancy boutiques, rode their bikes in great swarms down the carless thoroughfares, staged dances and boxing matches and every kind of performance in the parks. Moss vividly

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    Artful Volumes

    Echoing the murky sheen of sidewalk puddles, Salman Toor’s paintings revel in the absinthe-green palette of inebriation and hallucination. His compositions whisper of the dark delights of unlit alleyways, of clandestine trysts in the garden, or the unexpected thwack of a cricket bat against a stranger’s skull. Desire seeps through his canvases like spilled wine, but it’s the kind of longing laced through with recalcitrance, that sour taste in the mouth after a middling kiss.

    In “Salman Toor’s Brown Boys,” the opening essay for NO ORDINARY LOVE (Gregory R. Miller & Co./Baltimore Museum of Art,

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

    The Indie City

    IT IS FITTING THAT BRUCE ADAMS’S NEW BOOK, the sardonically titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill on the North Side: it was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, the Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant when they were first starting out.

    The Pumpkins, as they came to be known, were one of the first alternative-rock bands to break out of Chicago and sign to major record labels in the 1990s (others include Liz Phair, Urge Overkill, Wilco, and

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