“Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers” by Jean Strouse
In 1999 my mother introduced me to John Singer Sargent. I was fifteen, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was exhibiting the largest retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s works since 1926. Many of Sargent’s most famous paintings were at the MFA retrospective. There was Madame X (1883–84), the scandalous portrait that almost ended his […]
“New Mistakes” by Clement Goldberg
From the first paragraph, multidisciplinary artist and animator Clement Goldberg’s debut novel New Mistakes telegraphs to the reader that they can and should throw out everything they expect from conventional narrative fiction and instead just flow with this weird and wicked ride for the next two-hundred-something pages. Those familiar with Goldberg’s short stop-motion animated films […]
“The Mighty Red: A Novel” by Louise Erdrich
I grew up in a house four blocks away from the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota. Follow the current of the river north, and you’ll find the smaller burg of Grand Forks, where my parents were raised; keep going toward the Canadian border and you’ll reach the rural farms and Icelandic immigrant communities of […]
“Antiboy” by Valentijn Hoogenkamp, translated by Michele Hutchison
Newly discharged from my stay in the literary ICU that is Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain, I still had tubes, monitors, and groggy returns to consciousness on my mind when I encountered the narrator of Valentijn Hoogenkamp’s Antiboy waking up in a hospital bed. Surfacing from the anesthetics, Antiboy, Anti for short, tells the story […]
“Edges of Ailey” edited by Adrienne Edwards
If you’ve seen any photographs of the choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–89), it is quite likely that one of them was by Jack Mitchell, whose archive of Ailey photography (now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture) includes over 10,000 black-and-white negatives and 1,300 color slides and transparencies. Within this archive is […]
“Dear Dickhead” by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne
Dear Dickhead is the new novel by one of France’s most celebrated contemporary writers, the so-called punk Virginie Despentes, who came to literary fame as a twenty-three-year-old in 1993 with her first novel Baise-moi (usually translated as “fuck me”). Despentes is a Gen-X French version of Diablo Cody. Since creating Baise-moi, she’s made films and […]
“Liars: A Novel” by Sarah Manguso
In both her 2016 and 2018 Netflix comedy specials, Ali Wong was seven months pregnant. In both, she wore skintight minidresses in wild prints. She looked feral, grouchy, and ready to spring. It was striking. Her latest, Single Lady, is about her life after divorcing her husband of ten years. She wears a bow-necked white […]
‘Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs’ By Judith Barrington
There is a gorgeous moment in Judith Barrington’s new book where she helps Adrienne Rich into a hot tub. It’s a vulnerable moment between two women, just one of many in Barrington’s collection of linked essays. Each written to stand alone, together the fourteen short memoirs offer an exhilarating ride through second wave feminist London […]
‘SLUTS: Anthology’ Edited by Michelle Tea
Convinced that the vast volume of murder podcasts I was listening to was making me both dumber and more paranoid, I recently made a major intellectual upgrade and tried out . . . murder audiobooks. The kind of terrible women’s psychological thrillers that usually feature secret pasts, betrayals, specious plots, spouses who are not who […]
‘A Termination’ By Honor Moore
In 1969, while a grad student at Yale, the renowned poet and nonfiction author Honor Moore became unexpectedly pregnant. Today, she teaches poetry at the New School and is the author of several award-winning books, as well as the co-editor of Library of America’s 2021 volume collecting the greatest hits of the second wave. At […]