Book News & Updates
The Dude Ranch Above the Sea
As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his brain, and soon Fagen landed at […]
It Takes a Village
The Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays is relentlessly rude and crude, but also bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable.
An Exorcism
To the Editors: Catherine Nicholson’s review of Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of ‘King Lear’ [“The Cares of State,” NYR, October 9] is fascinating, and one of the most moving reviews I’ve ever read. But one remark of Nicholson’s confuses me. Near the end of her essay, she writes that the play’s “gods are […]
Anni’s Orchestra
Years later, when she could look back on her career as one of the towering twentieth-century textile artists, Anni Albers remembered attending the Berlin State Opera with her little sister, Lotte, and sitting in the family box. It wasn’t the performances that Anni remembered. It was the musicians tuning up, each contrasting instrument in its […]
Madonna
Today in a beam of sunthe baby’s eyelashes had gold in themand closed down on his cheek.Then clouds then sleet:April is fickle and all the worldis blowing, full of change.The baby holds my breast in his hand.The baby holds a goldfinch in his hand.The baby holds a piece of cloth against my cheekas if I […]
Call of Air
Accursed would you go as far as to covetyour neighbor’s long-gone past…Melancholy this sixth sense!No the appetite for things ebbingalready leaves a vast beach for the signsand I go and turn over one by one (at the risk of losing the onyx of my fingernail)these slimy rocks where seaweed frothsSo many brackish secrets haunt the low […]
Good-Bye Atlanticism, Hello Darkness
President Donald Trump’s threat to annex Greenland has by now been buried under dozens of new headlines about the depraved exploits of his second administration, but for the 57,000 people living there, being in the crosshairs of an expansionist American president is not something that fades quickly from memory. The consequences of Trump’s belligerence have […]
How the Web Was Lost
The Internet was not meant to suck.
‘Adventures in Sensations’
On December 18, 1974, Peter Hujar ate breakfast, met with an editor from Elle magazine, talked to Susan Sontag on the phone, spent the afternoon photographing a recalcitrant Allen Ginsberg, got Chinese takeout with the critic Vince Aletti, worked in the darkroom, practiced harpsichord, and fell asleep listening to the conversations of sex workers on […]