The Vying Animal

CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN ON BLAKE BAILEY’S BIOGRAPHY OF PHILIP ROTH

Slime Regained

A. S. HAMRAH ON BLOCKBUSTER FILMMAKER BARRY SONNENFELD’S MEMOIRS

Positive Obsession

GABRIELLE BELLOT ON OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S FARSEEING FICTION

NICK PINKERTON on the making of Midnight Cowboy

BOOKFORUM CONTRIBUTORS on this season’s notable art books

CARL WILSON on Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused

ED PARK on Susanna Clarke’s house of wonders

EMILY GOULD interviews Vivian Gornick

AUDREY WOLLEN: Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This

DENNIS LIM: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

CLAIRE JARVIS: Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind

NEGAR AZIMI: Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables

LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER: Yxta Maya Murray’s Art Is Everything

JO LIVINGSTONE: Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby

LIZZY HARDING: Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts

GENE SEYMOUR: Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

CHARLOTTE SHANE: Melanie Challenger’s How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human

ALBERT MOBILIO: McArthur Binion: DNA

JENNIFER KRASINSKI: Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer

LEO ROBSON: Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

ZOÉ SAMUDZI: Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America

JANE HU: Timothy Brennan’s Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

MARCO ROTH: Richard Wollheim’s Germs: A Memoir of Childhood

JENNIFER WILSON: George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

GERALD HOWARD: Saul Friedländer’s Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time

MICHAEL ROBBINS: Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire

ALEX PRESS: Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America