WILLA CATHER WAS A MASTER OF BEGINNINGS. O Pioneers! (1913), her first novel after the false start of Alexander’s Bridge (1912), opens on a provocatively odd note: “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.” Soon the attention shifts to the “cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky . . . set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were

The Winter 2024 issue of Bookforum is online now! In this edition: Gene Seymour revisits John A. Williams’s unsung 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am; Jennifer Krasinski writes about Anne Carson’s unruly art of renewal; Carl Wilson considers Kyle Chayka’s book on algorithms and our supposedly flat new world; Jamie Hood reads Blake Butler’s anguished portrait of his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak; Katie Kadue reviews My Weil, Lars Iyer’s reconfigured campus novel; Kay Gabriel explores loss, abundance, and time in Robert Glück’s About Ed; and so much more. Also: reading recommendations on the war in Gaza, a

Welcome to the Fall 2023 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, our contributors review new novels by Ed Park, J. M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Lexi Freiman, and more. Also in this edition: Katie Kadue reads scene stealer and meme factory Julia Fox’s memoir; Hanif Abdurraqib writes about obsession, mythology, and Will Hermes’s new biography of Lou Reed; Audrey Wollen considers Helen Garner’s newly reissued 1984 novel The Children’s Bach; Laura Kipnis reads Janet Malcolm’s posthumous confessional memoir; Jane Hu surveys Sigrid Nunez’s quietly defiant fiction; and so much more.

WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. 

BEYOND AN OLDER SIBLING’S headphones wringing the sweet, distorted fuzz of the Velvet Underground out and into my ears, my second most notable encounter with Lou Reed was in the pages of the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which has a whole section dedicated to Bangs and his relentless sparring with Reed. A book within a book, almost. There are two interviews that would, today, seem alarming in both their approach and the nature of their candidness, with Bangs demeaning Reed’s pal David Bowie, Reed taking the bait, Bangs shouting that Reed is full of shit. The

IN THE SULLIVANIANS: SEX, PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND THE WILD LIFE OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNE, journalist Alexander Stille follows whispers of a psychoanalytic cult and breaks open the story of how psychotherapy escaped the consulting room and became the total environment of its patients. The book centers on Saul Newton, a therapist turned charismatic leader who directed a collective search for liberation through analysis and communal living. Needless to say, it all went horribly wrong.

AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.”