Formalist art critics used to say that the life of an artist was irrelevant to an understanding of his or her work,” Calvin Tomkins writes in the preface to Lives of the Artists, a collection of New Yorker profiles published over the past ten or so years. “In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” For critics of a certain generation—me, for instance—educated by art historians more inclined to mapping Lacan’s L Schema than outlining an artist’s formative years, Tomkins’s statement is like a grenade.

The borders of NATO member nations were once hair triggers for nuclear war with the Soviets. But in the post-cold-war era, NATO appears more like a geopolitical relic than a key piece in the apocalyptic endgame between superpowers. Still, the alliance remains a vast and powerful one, and as is always the case with things military, there exists a heroically proportioned bureaucracy. Artist Suzanne Treister makes canny use of one of its elements, the classification system of NATO’s Maintenance and Supply Agency, for her watercolors. The agency has a designated code for an entire world of military and nonmilitary material,

For those who object to the rise of pornography studies as an academic subfield or balk at paying astronomical tuition so their kids can watch people boink on-screen for course credit, Linda Williams is the one to blame. Her landmark 1989 study Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” was the first book to take porn seriously as a film genre, treating the subject with scholarly and theoretical sophistication while deftly evading the tedious pro-porn versus anti-porn arguments of the day. Now the canonical text in the field it initiated, Hard Core propelled a generation of porn

Timothy Ryback, a lithe, affable fifty-four-year-old, originally from Michigan, is in his favorite Paris haunt, the dark upstairs library of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, on the rue de la Bûcherie. A haven for serendipity—Ryback pulls down a volume at random and it turns out to be a history of the Bodley Head press, his publisher in Britain—the store is also a peculiarly American testament to a belief in literature and its endurance. Founded in 1951, by an American expat, George Whitman, it revived the name of the legendary store opened in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, who published the first

David Rhodes was still a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971 when Atlantic–Little, Brown editor Joseph Kanon bought his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, a fantastical, dark tale of two Iowa cities, launching a prolific literary career. Two more novels appeared in quick succession: The Easter House (1974), which earned Rhodes comparisons to Sherwood Anderson, and Rock Island Line (1975), which John Gardner cited as an exemplar of the form in On Becoming a Novelist. In 1972, the writer settled into a quiet life in a century-old farmhouse in the southern Wisconsin town of Wonewoc

The conjunction of warm water and flesh, the flesh being one’s own or that of others, inevitably has at least a splash of the erotic. After all, when we call an encounter or relationship steamy, it harks back to the ancient connection between the bathhouse and sex. Stew originally referred to the medieval bathhouse and its moist heat; by extension, via the sexual high jinks, often commercial, that took place there, the word bathhouse came to mean a house of prostitution.

For all the history made in Barack Obama’s successful presidential run, the final Election Day ballot was about us, not him. We voted, stared into the face of American racism, and made our choice. As the African-American comic Paul Mooney said, this was the first national election that forced whites to enter the voting booth and confront race—something that blacks, Mooney noted, have been doing ever since they could vote.

The picture “dissolves to life—and I enter a passageway of a street,” cobbled with lava, and the lunchtime air full of a “savage drum-roll of descending grilles” over one storefront after another. So in the opening pages of her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard sends her young narrator on a walk through the historic center of Naples. Jenny Unsworth has come to Italy to work as a translator for nato, but she has no particular interest in the place; she wants merely to be out of England. The war stands a decade in the past, yet the

The word patriarchy is often fodder for crude caricature in today’s debates about gender politics. On the one hand, it furnishes a ready touchstone for feminist academics—an all-purpose indictment of gender injustices, past and present—as any glance across women’s-studies sections in academic-press catalogues will quickly confirm. On the other, it serves as a no-less-convenient rhetorical cudgel for antifeminist writers (and, for that matter, bloggers, cable talk-show hosts, et al.) keen to dismiss or deride the sweep of feminist thought; in this usage, it doubles as a winking, half-ironic way of suggesting that, no, we don’t really live in anything so