“Existence is grounds for dismissal,” Jim Harrison wrote in an essay called “Food and Mood” originally published in Brick magazine in 2006. “It has only recently occurred to me that I might not be allowed to eat after I die.” If anyone could pull off eating in the afterlife, it would probably be Harrison, well known for all kinds of appetites here on Earth. Adventurous of both palate and mind, he was also a world traveler who loved Montana and Paris equally, he seemingly never said no to a road trip. One of the most memorable has to have been

The cover of Sarah Schulman’s new book shows a pretty sunset. Its title hovers in white letters over pink and blue clouds like a benign choir of aircraft. Schulman clearly intends to parachute her book into the debate over how people should respond to and resolve conflict. She is the author of ten novels, many plays (produced and unproduced), and five previous works of nonfiction, including influential, often combative books like The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009), and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012), about queer

Kate Zambreno’s first novel, O Fallen Angel, published in 2010 and just reissued by Harper Perennial, takes place somewhere between Middle America and hell, if hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously indicated in No Exit, is other people. There certainly seems to be no exit in O Fallen Angel, set in the suburban Midwest in a “Dreamhouse in the country far far away from all the scary city people alright let’s just say it in a whisper the scary (black) people they keep on coming closer and closer we keep on moving farther and farther away.” Mommy, an archetypal suffocating mother,

The debate about whether women can “have it all” has aged only slightly better than stock photos of women in skirt suits with babies on their hips. Yet the questions at the heart of that worn-out conversation are freshly animated in Ariel Levy’s new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply. Levy defines “it all” as not simply “a career and a family,” but a woman’s ability to live her life exactly as she wants to. “We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising,” she writes. “We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged

The keen catalogue CONSTANT: SPACE + COLOUR; FROM COBRA TO NEW BABYLON (NAI010 Publishers, $40) inadvertently bathes the utopian artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005) in a surprising light. It assiduously contextualizes his mildly bold, tidily irregular paintings, his three-dimensional wire and unusual-for-their-time Plexiglas constructions, and his visualization of “unitary urbanism” (a total human habitat where “life is a game” that merges “the science fiction of social life and urban planning”). Situationist International cofounder Guy Debord christened Constant’s plans for better-living-through-poetry environments “New Babylon,” though Constant didn’t stick with the Situationists for long. There is an affirmative, even (shh!) utilitarian spirit to

The unusually striking photograph on the cover of Mary V. Dearborn’s new biography Ernest Hemingway shows the writer in his prime in 1933 sitting on the cushioned stern of a boat, possibly his thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser the Pilar, and aiming a pistol at the camera. He always carried guns on board to shoot sharks or, when bored or annoyed, seabirds and turtles. He was thirty-four when this photo was taken and he had recently discovered Key West and the fabulous Gulf Stream with its gigantic marlin, sailfish, and tarpon. He fished and fished and fished, insatiable. There were the heroic

They saw dead people. They heard them too. When summoned, dead people rang bells, wrote on slates, levitated tables. Sometimes their faces hovered in the air. The dead made this commotion for their parents, children, siblings, and friends at the behest of gifted individuals capable of readily communing with the world beyond. If the movement associated with this phenomenon, known as spiritualism—which was popular to varying degrees from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—now appears a quaint relic of a benighted past, we should consider the vigorous currency of aura reading, crystal healing, and psychic consultations. These descendants of