You don’t choose to attend a performance at the floating cabaret, the Avalon. The Avalon chooses you. And you’re not only the guest of honor—you’re the only guest. Every song, every dance, every act is written just for you. But the invitation comes at a high price: step on board once, you risk leaving your old life behind forever. This […]
Books
Books: This One Will Put You to Sleep, Review by Michael Quinn
Hearing someone tell you about a dream they had can make your eyes glaze over. It could be because dreams follow their own logic, unique to each of us. Dreams can feel specific, urgent and compelling after we’ve experienced them, but vague, meandering and uninteresting in the retelling. Cartoonist Roz Chast understands this completely—but she still wants to tell you […]
Quinn on Books: A Plunge Into a New Reality, by Michael Quinn
Review of War Diary, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Greg Nissan Right now, as you read this, there’s a war going on. Maybe you know every detail. Maybe you’ve skimmed the headlines. Maybe it feels like it has nothing to do with you. But what if the war was happening where you lived? You might think, This can’t be happening. […]
Quinn on Books: Mama’s Boy; Matt Caprioli’s One Headlight, review by Michael Quinn
We are children for only a short time, but spend the rest of our lives making sense of our childhoods. It’s an impressionable period of so many firsts. We soak them up like a sponge. In his heartfelt coming-of-age memoir One Headlight, Matt Caprioli (a former arts editor of this paper) wrings out his origin story as a gay man […]
Quinn on Books: Human Alien-ation | Review of Falling from Trees by Michael Quinn
Not interested in science fiction? A longtime argument holds: Look beyond the setting (say, outer space) and the characters (maybe little green men) to find what’s human at its core—and therefore relatable. On their surface, the 21 short stories in “Falling from Trees” by Michael Fiorito are very much concerned with things like aliens and space travel. The characters are […]
A Singer Contorts Herself into the Shape of a Poet, Review by Michael Quinn
Review of Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey Review by Michael Quinn Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, a collection of poems by the popular singer Lana Del Rey, wears its Beat-poet influences proudly. It reads like an unedited love letter to and from California, a place of “1,000 fires” and “scorched earth.” The small, hardcover […]
The Beating Heart in The Living Dead, by Kurt Gottschalk
From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so […]
QUINN ON BOOKS: “Black Lives Matter”
Review of Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski James Baldwin, the late black, gay, American writer, used his work to boldly explore racial and social issues. According to Baldwin, his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room (about an American man in Paris who falls in love with an Italian bartender) was “not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if […]
Quinn on Books: ‘The Dairy Restaurant’ by Ben Katchor
For months now, New Yorkers have been bent out of shape, either cooped up at home or stretched thin on the front line of what’s happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s strange to think of the world we all inhabited a few months ago, the casual freedoms we enjoyed: seeing friends, going out to eat. In his ambitious illustrated history […]
Quinn on Books: My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp
We inherit many things from our mothers, from the color of our eyes to our bad skin. Is it possible we inherit the traumas they’ve experienced as well? Belgian writer and director Chantal Akerman was the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, and her mother was the subject of much of her work. My Mother Laughs, recently translated from the French […]