Culture

print • Summer 2023

On mourning, the plague, and the birth of the death instinct • Sarah Nicole Prickett

WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road,

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print • Summer 2023

Christina Sharpe’s intimate commentary on memory, rage, and grief • Harmony Holiday

And I’m not sure why I’m infatuated with death.

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print • Summer 2023

Brian Dillon’s anti-critical criticism • Ryan Ruby

IN OSCAR WILDE’S “The Critic as Artist,” Ernest cajoles his friend Gilbert off the piano bench and into an armchair for a discussion, as the original title of the mock-Socratic dialogue would have it, of the “function and value of criticism.” Over the course of an evening passed in the library of his Piccadilly town house, Gilbert, an incorrigible contrarian, pours glass after glass of epigram, paradox, and hyperbole down the throat of Ernest’s received ideas until they can no longer stand up.

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print • Summer 2023

The elusive art of Harry Smith • Sasha Frere-Jones

COME BACK WITH ME, children, to a New York before David Zwirner was Robert Moses, when nobody was watching and a “slightly hunchback, short, magical-looking” buddy from the Pacific Northwest could flood the caves of independent film with color and mayhem. Care was different then—the Hotel Chelsea wouldn’t kick you out for setting off the fire alarm and Allen Ginsberg was keeping visionaries in milk and blankets on 12th Street. The buddy from Washington State was Harry Smith, and John Szwed has ably shaped his chaos for the first full biography, Cosmic Scholar. What remains to be determined—and will be partly

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• June 22, 2023

The magazine relaunches in partnership with The Nation • Bookforum editors

We are thrilled to announce that, after a brief hiatus, Bookforum is returning under new ownership. If you care about our magazine’s mission, please show your support by getting a subscription today. You will get four print issues per year, beginning with our Summer 2023 issue in August. Bookforum has long staked out new territory in the […]

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

The art of Gordon Matta-Clark • Sasha Frere-Jones

IT IS MY FAULT and only mine if I keep Gordon Matta-Clark as a personal Jesus, but the story flies. Matta-Clark died, way too early, at the age of thirty-five in 1978, and spent a chunk of his time slicing up abandoned buildings, which is very Jesus-y. One of his building cuts has become a permanent part of Manhattan’s west side—of that, more soon—and he even contributed to New York’s proudest category of impermanence: the restaurant. (RIP Food, Soho, 1971–1989.) Matta-Clark was tuned to frequencies prophetic in nature and number: the glow of decay, the need to befriend ghosts, and

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Hilton Als’s conflicted love letter to Prince • Harmony Holiday

PINUPS ARE RUMORED TO EMERGE FROM THE SEA, mer-peoples caught between nautical and earthly existence, so that maybe there are fewer black pinups circulating in popular culture, because the sea for us is in part the graveyard of the Middle Passage, not just an escapist fantasy. Black pinups would emerge blood-drenched and haunting, rather than seducing onlookers. Just bypass the trance of glamour and observe Josephine Baker’s double consciousness in any photograph, at once entertaining you and devastating you, silly and caustic with grief. Or just look at Prince and try not to fall in love. Hilton Als’s account of

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power’s interwar art • Apoorva Tadepalli

IN A TEACHING MANUAL she wrote in the 1980s, the artist Sybil Andrews stressed the importance of reaching into an image for its essence, stripping away whatever stagnated it. “Can you catch that? Can you get that sense of movement?” she would ask. The advice revealed a design philosophy that had defined her work for decades: her 1931 linocut In Full Cry shows a row of horses leaping over a hedge, their riders’ coattails soaring behind them. The lines themselves are Andrews’s subject, vigorous and unflinching. “I don’t draw the horse jumping,” she said. “I draw the jump.”

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

A new history of a legendary Chicago record label • J. C. Gabel

IT IS FITTING THAT BRUCE ADAMS’S NEW BOOK, the sardonically titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill on the North Side: it was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, the Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant when they were first starting out.

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Barry Schwabsky

Pierre Fatumbi Verger, Colonial Park Pool, Harlem, New York, 1937. © Pierre Fatumbi Verger BORN IN 1902, Pierre Verger became a successful photojournalist in his native France, in 1934 cofounding an agency whose members included the likes of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He lived mainly in Brazil from 1946 until his death fifty years later, […]

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Sofi Thanhauser’s social history of fabrics and fast fashion • Nikki Shaner-Bradford

AS A CHILD, I dreamed I would one day become a fashion designer. It’s one of those gigs, like astronaut or firefighter, that seems fun until you get too old to overlook the occupational hazards. For fashion, the dangers have long been hidden. In recent years, news coverage of “fast fashion,” a deceptively light term for cheaply manufactured clothing that pollutes landfills and oceans while exploiting and endangering workers, has proliferated—while solutions have not. The disconnect is understandable though hardly excusable: consumers look to material goods to change the way they feel, and fashioning a new sense of self doesn’t usually

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Albert Mobilio

Frank Bowling, Doughlah G.E.P., 1968–71, acrylic on canvas, 90 × 71 7∕8″. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage, London & ARS, New York. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston IN 1969 THE BRITISH-GUYANESE painter Frank Bowling curated a show at the art gallery of Stony Brook University that included, along with himself, five African […]

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

The season’s outstanding art books • Bookforum contributors

Salman Toor, Crying Boy with Candle, 2021, oil on panel, 16 × 12″. Echoing the murky sheen of sidewalk puddles, Salman Toor’s paintings revel in the absinthe-green palette of inebriation and hallucination. His compositions whisper of the dark delights of unlit alleyways, of clandestine trysts in the garden, or the unexpected thwack of a cricket […]

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

The private longing and public performance of going out • Sophie Haigney

LAST WEEKEND I WENT to a party where people were wearing black lipstick, tropical shirts, chokers, and little drink umbrellas behind their ears. That was because the theme was “Hot Topic in the Tropics.” Many of the same people had recently been at another party where we danced on an Astroturf rooftop at a house rumored to be owned by the daughter of a famous dead novelist where there was a bathtub full of beers. Most of us had met at a succession of parties held in different cities over the course of more than a decade: birthday parties, magazine parties,

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Bunny Mellon’s majestically contradictory style • Rachel Tashjian

WHO WAS BUNNY MELLON? A photo caption in the opening pages of the new book I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise: A Life of Bunny Mellon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40), by her erstwhile ghostwriter-cum-biographer Mac Griswold, describes her simply as “icon and woman.” More specifically, Mellon was a lifestyle pioneer, for whom the domestic space—the garden and home, with its antiques and art, but also its mood, energy, and ambience—was a Gesamtkunstwerk. She didn’t simply throw parties, she transported guests into ephemeral realms. As a mentor and bestie to First Lady Jackie Kennedy, she helped mold the aesthetic of

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

Writers on their favorite books of 2022 • Bookforum contributors

JEREMIAH MOSS’s FERAL CITY concerns the summer of 2020, when after covid’s devastating first pass through New York City and the consequent exodus of everyone who could afford it, an invisible city rose up. The poor, the young, the nonwhite, the queer, the marginal were its constituents, and they made full use of public spaces […]

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• Dec/Jan/Feb 2023

A biography of George Balanchine shows the fragile contingency of genius • Siobhan Phillips

A QUICK GLANCE at the facts of George Balanchine’s life suggests that he was destined to be a great choreographer. Born in 1904, he studied at what was then the most important ballet academy in the world, the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg; in the ’20s, he made dances in Europe for what was then the most important company in the world, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; by midcentury, in the United States and with his own troupe, he would finish creating what is still probably the most important choreographic canon in the world, Balanchine’s ballets. But Jennifer Homans’s new biography shakes

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• November 29, 2022

The winter issue is online now! • Bookforum editors

Welcome to the Dec/Jan/Feb 2023 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, read: Harmony Holiday on Hilton Als’s conflicted love letter to Prince; Justin Taylor on whether Cormac McCarthy is “our most minor major novelist or is he our most major minor novelist”; Christine Smallwood on a new biography of Shirley Hazzard; Becca Rothfeld on Colette’s Chéri novels and the mantle of girlhood; George Saunders interviewed by Angelo Hernandez-Sias; Siobhan Phillips on choreographer George Balanchine and the fragile contingency of genius; Lisa Borst on Sam Lipsyte’s 1990s neopunk noir novel; Rebecca Ariel Porte on Ian Patterson’s new translation of Proust’s Finding Time Again; Michael

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• November 14, 2022

A new biography of novelist Shirley Hazzard • Christine Smallwood

SHIRLEY HAZZARD WAS BORN in Sydney, Australia, in 1931. She was the second daughter of Reg and Kit, who met while working in the office of the engineering company that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Theirs was a marriage marked, as Brigitta Olubas puts it in Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, by an “almost lifelong incompatibility” made more difficult by Reg’s alcoholism and Kit’s bipolarity. Shirley was Kit’s favorite. When she was six or seven years old, Kit asked her to come to the kitchen so they could together put their heads into the gas oven. Shirley later said that the

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• November 8, 2022

Joe Coscarelli’s new book on Atlanta’s rap scene • Stephen Kearse

A MONTH BEFORE Atlanta hosted the first hip-hop-focused spinoff of the BET Awards in 2006, an executive at the cable network joked the event would likely not benefit the local economy. He was probably right. Rap dollars already coursed through the Southern city like its ceaseless traffic, bankrolling recording studios, propping up nightclubs and music-publishing companies, and sustaining a vast corps of DJs, strippers, bodyguards, and lawyers. After the inaugural BET Hip Hop Awards aired and nearly half the honors went to Atlantans, local rapper T. I.—who won four awards that night, the largest individual takeaway—described the show’s location as the

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