• print • Dec/Jan 2018

    LAST SPRING, DOCUMENTA, the beleaguered quinquennial art exhibition, proposed a rethink of the notion of Europe, decamping to Greece for an attempt at “Learning from Athens,” as its title claimed. Amid the festivities was a show at the Municipal Gallery of Athens, more modest in scale but every bit as ambitious in scope: “Maria Lassnig: The Future Is Invented with Fragments from the Past.” One of the final projects the great Austrian painter developed before her death in 2014, the exhibition compiles sketches, watercolors, and paintings charting Lassnig’s infatuation with Greek mythology. Primarily self-portraits, the images capture the artist infiltrating

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Halfway through Mean, Myriam Gurba’s coming-of-age memoir, an elderly woman named Muffins asks a teenage Gurba what she plans to do with her body when she dies. One of Gurba’s fellow volunteers at a local art museum, Muffins is also a representative of the Poseidon Society, which she describes as “an organization that advocates cremation. It’s the forward-thinking way of dealing with your remains. We also contract burials at sea.” Muffins hands over a business card and lowers her voice: “There are certain places where we’re not supposed to dispose. I can make those disposals happen.” The scene is at

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    On a recent episode of the web series Norm Macdonald Live, Jerry Seinfeld told a joke he promised only Jews would understand. This is a bold claim to make in 2017, after more than a century of shtick and oversharing from the borscht belt to Broadway to Broad City (and those are just the B’s!), small globs of Yiddish rising like schmaltz to the surface of the great melting pot. To suggest that there might be a cultural stone still unturned, some crumb of samizdat humor unknown to the goyim, seems like the kind of provocation that keeps conspiracy-minded anti-Semites

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Carroll Dunham is weird. (It’s a good thing.) Weird is the most-used adjective in his new book of essays, Into Words, followed by perverse. To Dunham, a renowned painter and frequent essayist on art, these are credentials for interesting, indicating that you might crack the nut, push the envelope, make a break for it, or run the ball out onto the fields of the crazy. Takes one to know one: He guides you to his own end zone of painting with texts from 1994 through 2016, waxing eloquent, or sometimes cranky, about the work and contexts of twenty-five or so

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    “Creating a narrative is a process,” announces Minna Zallman Proctor in “Folie à deux,” the first piece in Landslide: True Stories. This is the kind of silly, self-serious claim about autobiographical writing that would annoy me if it were not delivered with a heavy dose of irony, which, coming from Proctor, it most certainly is. Each of the stories in Landslide is a defiant and gleeful riposte to those who would dare treat narrative as a “process”: the humorless autobiographers and analysts who link sad memory to sad memory in what sometimes feels like a competitive bid for pathos without

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    The resolute, earnest, and somewhat wistful grandmother whose byline is attached to What Happened (Simon & Schuster, $30) comes across in its pages as someone you’d love to have over to binge-watch The Crown on Netflix, enjoy meeting up with to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, or trust with your small children for a long afternoon as you deal with an unexpected emergency. Only the most credulously stubborn, or stubbornly credulous, of readers could come away from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loser’s-lounge testament believing her to be the malevolent dark angel of Far Right and extreme-Left fantasies.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    “There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation,” W. C. Fields supposedly said. A title like Trump Is F✳︎cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) (Blue Rider Press, $27) certainly does that. What it doesn’t do is inspire much confidence that the crass political discourse the Trump era has fostered will turn chockablock with bonhomie anytime soon. But Keith Olbermann doubtless thinks he’s fighting fire with fire.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    Artists who make books are as varied as artists who make anything else, and they offer just as many reasons for their fixation. For some it’s a documentary form, one that both toys with history and creates it, as in Christian Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–1950 (Research and Presentation of All That Remains of My Childhood, 1944–1950), a 1969 précis of his childhood that mixes real mementos with found materials. For Sophie Calle, Stanley Brouwn, and others, books begin as interior spaces—diaries or sketchbooks for jotting notes and thought experiments—before inspiring a

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2018

    “This is the Seinfeld cookbook,” Mike Solomonov explained to me earlyish one morning not too long ago. “It’s about nothing.” We were standing in the original Federal Donuts shop, which he and four partners opened in the low-slung, residential, and decidedly uncool Pennsport neighborhood of South Philadelphia in 2011. Sunlight streamed in through a plate-glass window emblazoned with the company’s red rooster logo, and the smells of sugar and coffee and hot fat were in the air. Steven Cook, one of Solomonov’s partners and a cofounder of CookNSolo Restaurant Partners, the pair’s mini empire of Philadelphia eateries, was behind a

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    A couple of years into devising the signature magazine of the 1980s, Tina Brown decided she was sick of people writing about her gift for generating “buzz.” That made what she did sound “fake and manufactured,” Brown lamented: “It’s a put-down, a dismissal of impact.” Not unreasonably, she wondered if a male editor in her shoes would get similarly trivializing treatment.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    I teach memoir writing, and occasionally my students want to learn how to be funny, which fills me with despair. There are many great memoirs—The Liars’ Club, Wild, Autobiography of a Face, Shot in the Heart, The Kiss—and hardly any of them are funny. Real-life tales of suffering, endurance, recovery, emotional survivalism—these are the generally established plotlines for contemporary memoir, what allow writers to indulge literary egocentrism for 280 pages, and what allow readers to be pain voyeurs in a safe, temporary environment. Happily, there are exceptions.Poet Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (Riverhead, $27) is one.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” So goes the famous William Morris quotation. A great many domestic possessions, of course, are either one or the other. But the world seems short on things that are both. Among my own small trove, I count a wristwatch that belonged to my late father, a silver-dipped porcelain serving bowl I received as a gift, and the original bronze doorknobs in my apartment. We all succumb to the need

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    “I Just Shot John Lennon,” screams a headline from the December 9, 1980, edition of the New York Post. (If there’s anything certain in our precarious world, it’s the Post’s hoary sensationalism.) A facsimile of its front page appears as one of the endpapers in CLUB 57: FILM, PERFORMANCE, AND ART IN THE EAST VILLAGE, 1978–1983 (MoMA, $40),a catalogue that documents the sordid and celebratory goings-on of a time and place in Manhattan that seems fresher, queerer, and more illicit than the swipe-right chickenshit assimilationism of New York City today. Club 57 (and sister haunts such as the Mudd Club

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018
    *Duncan Hannah, Greenwich, CT, ca. 1973.* © Danny Fields.

    Landing in the cratered, tawdry New York City of the 1970s, Duncan Hannah was a distracted art student who became a fitfully aspiring painter-illustrator. Before maturing into the stylish throwback artist he is today—the Evelyn Waugh of painting, beautifully reimagining Bridesheads past and bygone movie stars—he cut a resplendently androgynous figure on the CBGB scene, as both a born bon vivant and a straight sex object who wouldn’t give his gay patrons a tumble. (“A cocktease,” grumped his disgruntled harassers, who were legion.) At one point, he thought of calling this book Cautionary Tales. He was a Gatsby-in-training who was

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    CUBA HAS LONG BEEN IMPRINTED on the American imagination as a place stylishly, nostalgically lost in time, romanticized in an image vocabulary of architectural ruins, classic Chevrolets, and tiny, tough old ladies smoking fat cigars. In Rose Marie Cromwell’s debut monograph, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, the artist unearths another side of the country, lodged somewhere between surreality and vérité. The title, which translates as “the supreme book of luck,” takes its name from a guide to the charada, a “Chinese-Cuban folkloric number system” Cromwell discovered while hanging out with Havana locals. Each number corresponds to a list of

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN looking and seeing—between mere perception of surfaces and an understanding of their meanings—is a division that photographic art is especially disposed to explore. Photographers have long pressed against their art’s presumed documentary function, creating a subjective sense of the seen by applying the tools of their craft. This persona-driven approach was challenged by Bernd and Hilla Becher, founders of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, whose students included Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth. Known for their typological studies of industrial structures, the Bechers declined to pursue the “decisive moment” and instead sought clarity and

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Toward the middle of his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina recalls an anticolonial reverie he experienced while getting drunk in a cheap bar in Nairobi as a young man. He had just read Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, which had been banned by the Kenyan government. “It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language,” Wainaina writes. “English is the language of the colonizer.” He dreamed of abandoning his professional life entirely, giving up on his plans to

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2018

    Gig-economy guru Tim Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World might be the last self-help book you’ll need. Just finishing it proves you don’t need help. You’re disciplined, motivated, open-minded. You accept chaos. It’d be easier to complete the twelve steps and implement all the habits of highly successful people than get through these six hundred pages of non sequitur life tips, offered by more than a hundred high achievers:

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Fordham sociology professor Heather Gautney went to work in Bernie Sanders’s Senate office on an academic fellowship in 2012 and then signed up for his 2016 presidential campaign, ultimately playing a role in the Sandernistas’ wrangling over the party platform with Hillary Clinton’s DNC apparatchiks at that year’s Democratic convention. To say the least, aiming for a conciliatory note in the aftermath doesn’t interest her much. Especially when she goes prescriptive, reading Crashing the Party: From the Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement(Verso, $17) can feel like watching a bulldozer try to disguise itself as an ambulance.

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    It felt inevitable that in Rick Bragg’s new food memoir I would come across a recipe instruction like this one: “If you want crispier possum, bake uncovered for about 30 minutes.” Before I started reading, I’d checked in with a Southern friend, who immediately proclaimed, unprompted, that if there wasn’t a chapter on possum in The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table (Knopf, $29), it basically didn’t qualify as a book about Southern food. There was no way that Bragg, lyrical chronicler of twentieth-century life in the foothills of Alabama, where he grew up, was going

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