Real Journalism written by people
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
There isn’t a human life on earth that hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time in human history, there’s no other place to which we can escape. Here in New York City, many of us are quarantined at home. The nesting instinct isn’t natural this time of year when, through our dirty winter windows, we can […]
Review of Kevin Baker’s The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence Years ago, I came across a seldom-seen friend on Houston Street. Ranee was sitting on a bench in front of an American Apparel, wearing sunglasses and eating an ice cream cone, looking very self-satisfied. We marveled at the unlikely odds of […]
Review of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019 by Natasha Stagg In another era, the worst thing you could be accused of was selling out. But for a younger generation, it’s become the objective: the new version of the American dream. No matter how old you are, the corporatization of our culture makes it common to talk about things […]
The late novelist and short story writer Stephen Dixon will be honored by authors and an actor at “Celebrating Stephen Dixon,” a literary event hosted by Murmrr in the Union Temple of Brooklyn, near Grand Army Plaza, on Thursday, February 27,, 2020 at 7:30 PM. Dixon, a Manhattan native, died this past November at the age of 83. Describing himself […]
Horror Stories, the memoir by recording artist Liz Phair, is not a bad book, but it’s an odd one with which to have made her debut as a writer, and it’s certainly not the one fans of her music will wish she’d have written. Despite Phair’s assertion that it’s her “effort to slow everything down and take a look at […]
Carmen Maria Machado is a queer writer who gained a widespread following from her experimental collection of eight short stories: Her Body & Other Parties; (2017) a finalist for the National Book Award. Machado’s debut is dark, playful and experimental. In “Especially Heinous,” Machado rewrites 300 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and in “The Husband Stitch,” Machado […]
The cheapest type of movie you can make is a movie that takes place on paper – that is, a novel. Cinema and prose fiction are different art forms with different strengths, but don’t tell that to Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995), the French crime novelist whose 1972 literary sensation Nada recently appeared in English for the first time, thanks to New […]
Téa Obreht’s former student reviews her long-awaited sequel Téa Obreht’s new novel Inland is a triumphant sweeping epic that sets out across the American West following two narrators: Lurie, a stateless orphan turned outlaw trying to claim his place in the world, and Nora, a frontierswoman clinging to the community she helped build as her husband and oldest sons go […]
It’s been nearly a decade since the world heard from Jackson Brodie, the sardonic private eye at the heart of British novelist Kate Atkinson’s series of mysteries. He was probably glad to have a vacation. Brodie has been through a lot in the course of his adventures, not least a seemingly perpetual midlife crisis, which he wrestles with at least […]
WE WHO INHERIT THE EARTH It’s not just saints and prophets who endure the weak, the lame, the denialists. So too do Mets fans comprise such noble breed. To endure the hell of rooting for fallen heroes – great athletes who won’t bust it out of the box, adjust too eagerly to failure, or break down upon doing a deal […]
