• print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Let It Bleed

    WHEN I FINISHED MY FIRST READ of Which as You Know Means Violence, critic Philippa Snow’s debut “on self-injury as art and entertainment,” I returned to my own cultural hallmark of suffering, the 2006 film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. Reading Snow’s analysis of artist Chris Burden’s 1974 crucifixion atop a Volkswagen Beetle alongside the comical stunts of Johnny Knoxville and his squad of Jackass pranksters, I thought frequently of Paul Bettany’s fanatical Silas, who torments himself to such extremes that he plays at the brink of absurdity. Silas spends most of his screen time scurrying

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Spinster Class

    AT THE END of a long Michaelmas term working in the Barbara Pym archives in the Bodleian (how about that for an opening gambit?), I, six months pregnant with my second child, took a train out past Charlbury, caught a tiny bus, and deposited myself, thankfully in Wellington boots, on the side of the road near Finstock. I walked across two very muddy, December fields and found myself loitering outside of Holy Trinity, a mild, rundown, Victorian church. The church itself is a bit of a mishmash of Gothic Revival and practicality, with its 1905 chancel poking out awkwardly through its 1841 bones.

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Cinema Was Everything

    AS A CHILD, SERGE DANEY KNEW his father only through the stories his mother told him. According to legend, Pierre Smolensky was a worldly, well-to-do gentleman involved in the business of cinema; throughout the interwar years, he dubbed films and perhaps even appeared in some under the stage name Pierre Sky. Only seventeen when Pierre took her under his wing, Daney’s mother claimed that he spoke all the languages in the world. For a while, the memory of Pierre was preserved in mythological amber, not unlike the images of Cary Grant and James Stewart, those beautiful American stars whom the

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Artful Volumes

    Before Joan Didion died in 2021, she and her friend, fellow writer Hilton Als, discussed a possible “exhibition as portrait” that would put visual art in conversation with her writing. The resulting exhibition opened at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) this fall, and the catalogue, JOAN DIDION: WHAT SHE MEANS (DelMonico Books/Hammer Museum, $40), includes many of the pieces on display. Didion’s time in New York City, where she worked for Vogue in the 1950s and early ’60s, is represented by some iconic Arbus, Avedon, Hopper, and Warhol images, and by lesser-known works such as Helen Lundeberg’s

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    How Should a Patient Be?

    RACHEL AVIV’S STRANGERS TO OURSELVES: UNSETTLED MINDS AND THE STORIES THAT MAKE US is a book about psychiatry, but it is also a book about the self, “the facets of identity that our theories of the mind fail to capture,” one written with an astonishing amount of attention and care. Since Westerners tend to conflate the self with the mind—or at least locate the former inside the latter—behavioral science is a field that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) presumes to explain why we are the way we are, which is also to say why we are who we are: our chemistry is imbalanced, we’re holding a

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Meditations in an Emergency

    I REMEMBER seeing the cover of B. S. Johnson’s book Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? in a bookstore when I was eighteen. (Johnson was thirty-nine, had only a few months to live then, and his book is not in fact a memoir.) That title stayed with me for years and haunted me whenever I’d think of writing anything concerning my own life. The proper time to write a memoir was one’s sunset years, when one had retired from the hustle and bustle and could sit by the window in quiet contemplation. One’s task in the intervening decades was to write novels, which were generally understood

    Read more
  • print • Sep/Oct/Nov 2022

    Dressed to Thrill

    IN 1913, Sonia Delaunay appeared in a Parisian ballroom wearing a dress she had designed. A Cubist patchwork of vivid colors, the garment inspired enthusiastic reactions from artists and poets already immersed in the European avant-garde. Blaise Cendrars wrote a poem to the dress; Apollinaire encouraged his readers to visit the dance hall on Thursdays when Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay arrived arrayed in the clothes she made. The Robe simultané (Simultaneous dress) was Sonia’s attempt to activate via bodily motion the color dynamism she was exploring in her abstract paintings. A rhythm

    Read more
  • review • September 06, 2022

    The fall issue is online now!

    Welcome to the Sep/Oct/Nov 2022 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, read: Meghan O’Rourke on Lynne Tillman’s new memoir about the challenges of looking after a sick parent; Lucy Sante on Emmanuel Carrère’s latest, which the author intended to be a short best-seller about a yoga retreat but instead ended up being about his mental breakdown; Moira Donegan on a pre-Roe abortion service run by Chicago activists; Charlie Tyson on Darryl Pinckney’s coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a tribute to Elizabeth Hardwick; an interview with Namwali Serpell about storytelling, grief, and experiential

    Read more
  • excerpt • August 16, 2022

    The Go-Between

    For a writer whose most visible work, Dictée, brims with saints and martyrdom and the possibilities of productive anguish, it’s fitting that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disparate uncollected writings—everything from artists’ books to typewritten disjecta membra—should give off the refulgent glow of relics set against plain white cloth. Since there will be no new writing from the late author, every word counts. Indeed, for an artist so committed to permutations of language—to literally mincing words, teasing meanings from amputations, one character at a time—every letter counts. Is a crossed-out

    Read more
  • excerpt • August 04, 2022

    Double Down

    There is a funny paradox in American culture. The nation began in revolt against British sovereignty and defined itself for generations against UK ruling-class values of crown, empire, and tradition. And yet in the Golden Age of Hollywood, on the run-up to American hegemony, the ideology of empire reentered the American bloodstream, adapted for mass society and a technocratic state. The medieval term translatio imperii, which once described the divine succession of emperors, later named the westward drift of power. It mutated into a doctrine of manifest destiny for aspirational American settlers.

    Read more
  • excerpt • July 14, 2022

    Likely Stories

    In 2012, the British magazine Sight and Sound polled the film critics of the world to name “the best picture ever made,” and the result, that year, was Hitchcock’s Vertigo. David Thomson has described the film as a “piercing dream,” but, possibly challenging common sense, I am not going to explicate the full plot of the film at length here, or make a claim for it, in case the reader has never seen it. I will simply say that in this movie, a detective is asked to follow a beautiful, glamorous woman who is thought to be suicidal. Notice that the plot really begins with a request moment based on

    Read more
  • print • June/July/Aug 2022

    A Bloop and a Blast

    SEVERAL YEARS AGO, while visiting my parents’ house, I found an artifact of my tortured early years of baseball fandom. It was a journal I was assigned to keep at the beginning of first grade, a stretch of time in the autumn of 1993 that coincided with a thrillingly unexpected Philadelphia Phillies postseason run. “I like the Phillies,” I wrote on October 8—a rather bold statement, given that the Greg Maddux–led Atlanta Braves had clobbered them 14–3 in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series the night before. I added several small crayon illustrations, as if placing my modest offerings

    Read more