AH SATIE AGAIN! When Roger Shattuck wrote his The Banquet Years chapters dedicated to Satie back in 1955, he could still describe the enigmatic Parisian as “a musician more heard of than heard.” In the mid-1980s, when I read Shattuck’s portrait of the Belle Epoque demimonde, I distinctly remember thinking that Aldo Ciccolini’s Satie disks […]
“A SALESMAN HAS TO SEE PEOPLE AS THEY ARE,” says the protagonist of Helen DeWitt’s 2011 novel, Lightning Rods, a satire about a failed door-to-door salesman who invents a business model that winds up reordering the modern workplace. “No matter how badly people want something,” he explains, “if they don’t want to be the kind […]
SELF-PROCLAIMED “DEADBEAT NEW YORK RESTAURATEUR” Keith McNally is not a man at peace with himself. This assessment requires no great leap of interpretation, given that his memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, opens with his 2018 suicide attempt. In McNally’s telling, he had been on top of the world just two years prior: happily married and […]
THE VISIONARY PAINTER, SCULPTOR, AND INVENTOR JACK WHITTEN (1939–2018) moved to New York City from Alabama in 1960. He later explained that, as a Black civil rights activist in Jim Crow country, staying put was not an option: “I knew that if I stayed in the South, somebody was gonna kill me or I was […]
SINCE LEAVING ANTIGUA FOR THE UNITED STATES in 1965, at the age of sixteen, Jamaica Kincaid has written fiction, essays, and memoirs that mull over her inheritance as the reluctant daughter of the British empire. She is best known for her slim novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990), about a rebellious girl growing up […]
SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur. The product’s package—a […]
Before dawn on January 9, 1800, a young boy emerged from the bare winter forests that surrounded a small village in southern France. A local caught him pulling out vegetables from a terraced back garden, naked except for the tatters of what was once a shirt. He was hungry, dirty, self-assured, and silent. The thick […]
POET AND LITERARY CRITIC Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot: A Life is a destabilizing achievement of radical self-exposure, interrogation of form, and defiance of reader expectation. Setting out to capture what it’s like to live through sexual violence and its aftershocks, the memoir records all the pain, the horror, the numbness; the forgetting and remembering and […]
The Summer 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay exploring Geoff Dyer’s new artistic territory, Brandon Taylor’s exploration of Ocean Vuong’s fictional worlds (and states of grace), and Janique Vigier’s celebration of Marlen Haushofer’s parables of isolation. Also in the issue: Angelo Hernandez Sias interviews Susan Choi; Audrey […]
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way […]
The Spring 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features Lidija Haas on Shulamith Firestone’s portrayal of life with mental illness; Moira Donegan on Peter Hujar’s photobook Portraits in Life and Death; and Jane Hu on Audition, the final novel in Katie Kitamura’s translation trilogy. Also in the issue: David Velasco talks with […]
WHEN SARAH SCHULMAN WALKED INTO MY APARTMENT, a month or so after Artforum magazine fired me in October 2023 for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation, her first words were, “How can I help?” I think this is the most ethical sentence in the English language. She said it like she meant […]
WHEN THE WRITER MAYUMI INABA meets Mii, the kitten who will become “the center of her life,” the animal is stuck in a school fence, screaming for rescue in the night air: a “little white dot” deposited there “out of malice or mischief” by a culprit long departed. There is no sign of her mother […]
IN EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM Hannah Arendt calls the transcript of the SS officer’s police examination “a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.” The ludicrous is perhaps easy enough to imagine; the humor hinges on Eichmann’s “heroic fight with […]
There is by now a vibrant and contentious literature on the relationship between political change and mental illness. Does despair breed compliance, or can you fight back harder the less you have to lose? Could a shared cause of psychological suffering become a cause, rallying and even sustaining the sufferers? Must a mind unhinge itself […]
YOU GOT got into my dreams and changed them into fantasies— The stupor between erotic slapstick and stoic mortification that should subsume anyone sentient after reading the inconclusive, concussive epilogue of Nettie Jones’s 1984 novel Fish Tales tempts you to return, puzzled and undone, to page one, to see if you overlooked the exact pivot […]
THE R. CRUMB STORY IS an amateur Freudian’s delight—I’m speaking of Freud the mischievous aesthetic theorist/detective, who thought that creativity and perversity share the same origins. Artists are people who’ve figured out how to transform their forbidden urges and fantasies into culture, lauded as heroes because the rest of us are pissed off about having […]
GUY DEBORD PUBLISHED The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 while shepherding the original Situationist International in Paris, a collective shimmy that tumbled into the protests of May 1968. This era has become a frozen plot point in the Wiki of the left while its theoretical leader remains, somehow, under-consulted. British art historian T. J. […]
TO DATE, I HAVE SEEN EVERY SEASON of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, a dating series in which attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people spend ten days speaking to other attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people through a wall, in the hopes that their inability to see each other will allow them to develop “real” feelings. These “real” […]
The artist Paul Thek sits with his face half cast in shadow, a look of curious expectation in his eyes. It is one of Peter Hujar’s relatively rare upright portraits: in many of the photographs in Portraits in Life and Death, his 1976 book recently reissued by Liveright, the subjects are reclining, sometimes tucked in […]
