Poets have long inhabited personas and channeled voices—think of Frank Bidart writing as Vaslav Nijinsky and the child-murderer and necrophiliac Herbert White; Anne Carson writing as the red-winged Geryon, in her verse-novel The Autobiography of Red; Gertrude Stein writing as her companion, Alice, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. As Bidart suggests in his poem “Advice to the Players,” artists, particularly poets, take on the roles of others to create a “mirror in which we see ourselves.” The late poet and artist Robert Seydel also explored a series of alternate identities, and in the process found a voice that

In 1976, Viv Albertine was a twenty-two-year-old Brit punk looking to shock and awe the general populace: “I walk around in little girls’ party dresses, hems slashed and ragged, armholes torn open to make them bigger, the waistline up under my chest. . . . Pippi Longstocking meets Barbarella meets juvenile delinquent. Men look at me and they are confused, they don’t know whether they want to fuck me or kill me. This sartorial ensemble really messes with their heads. Good.”

Lena Dunham’s anxiety about success was initially her avenue to it. In 2009, while living in her childhood home, she created the web series Delusional Downtown Divas with two friends she’d known since preschool. The three parodied their fates as “children of the art world,” lying around their parents’ lofts, smoking pot, and preening their personal brands. A diva on the telephone: “Father, it’s AgNess. I have some bargaining to do with you. I will not sell the Frank Stella painting, and in exchange I want Jeffrey Deitch’s phone number. . . . I would like to have his screen

Marian Bantjes, Hallowe’en Spider, 2006, ink on paper, 13 3/4 x 19 3/4″; The title of MARIAN BANTJES: PRETTY PICTURES (Thames & Hudson/ Metropolis Books, $75) projects a William Morris–like faith in the decorative, as well as an ironic awareness of that concept’s toxicity for modernists. The Vancouver-based artist’s 2010 collection, I Wonder, amply displayed […]

Late in the fall of 1999, the renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers retired from teaching, packed up her house in California, and moved into a loft near Union Square in New York City. High above a neighborhood that had once been home to printers and lithographers, Alpers had stunning views, with six windows facing west, two windows facing east, and an eyeful of sky in either direction. Each morning, she watched a play of shadows dance along the walls of adjacent buildings as day broke and sunlight slipped across nearby roofs, water towers, and eclectic architectural details, including a decorative

During the heyday of the LP, commercial record labels created both fantastic—and fantastically bad—album covers, but the experienced hands of a few and the watchful eyes of the many kept most record cover art more or less within the boundaries of professionalism. The private-press LPs documented in this spectacularly fun coffee-table book routinely cross those […]

All is quiet at Our Lady of the Nile, an elite boarding school high in the mountains of Rwanda. Or so it seems. Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga’s fairytale-like novel, is the literary equivalent of a slow burn. Set in 1979, it is a highly charged, fictional account of the events leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Using an unlikely focal point—a gaggle of senior-class high school girls at a small, religious school—Mukasonga answers the question of how such an atrocity could have occurred. The author lost twenty-seven members of her family in the genocide, so she

The essay, at its best, is a genre shaped by the character of its author. Charles D’Ambrosio describes it as “a forum for self-doubt.” The author’s irresolution runs throughout his new essay collection, Loitering (Tin House Books, 2014). In one piece, he describes watching a crow peck the breast of an injured robin, shortly after his brother’s suicide. Should he intervene? Would it matter? In another, he questions the motives of whale rights activists. Do they want to save whales because they no longer believe people can be saved? D’Ambrosio says that as a child he believed whales rose to

This summer, I had ophthalmic shingles. For a month, pain and I walked, as one nineteenth-century pain-sufferer put it, arm in arm. At the end of this cruel and unfair partnership, I still did not understand my companion, much as I wanted to. So when I heard about Joanna Bourke’s The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, an accomplished account of our strange and often contradictory attempts to comprehend, communicate, and relieve pain, I had my next read set for me.