Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
To go along with your “Howl” twitter feed, an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs called “Beat Memories.” Suggested admission $3. For more information, please visit nyu.edu/greyart. The post...
View ArticleMaking Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers
A micro room of our own: the Museum of the City of New York has a new exhibit called “Making Room” that presents a welcome antidote to the swollen McMansion: minute spaces beautifully designed....
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A Genius for Disaster
Studio Lindfors‘Times Square Flooded’; from the ‘Aqualta’ series by the architectural firm Studio Lindfors, whose renderings imagine how New York and Tokyo might adapt to allow rising sea levels to...
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In the Dark of the Museum
Hiroshi SugimotoAlaskan Brown Bear, 1980 The Alaskan brown bear rises up as tall as a brownstone and claws the bright wintery diorama sky; the vultures and hyenas and jackals hunch and squirm hideously...
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‘Enthralling & Enraging’
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSigmund Freud in his consulting room, Vienna, 1937 Two recently translated autobiographical German novels—both about becoming a writer—are deeply unsettling. Martin Walser’s...
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Weiner!
Eric Thayer/ReutersAnthony Weiner and Huma Abedin at the press conference announcing his intention to stay in New York’s mayoral race despite new revelations about his explicit text messages to women...
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No Love Without Delusion
Magnum Photos‘Dreaming in the Sun,’ Portofino, Italy, circa 1936; photograph by Herbert List André Aciman’s subject is exile. His first book, Out of Egypt (1995), was a wry and touching memoir of the...
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The Wisdom of the Yard
Korhan KaraoysalElif Batuman, Koç University, Istanbul, May 2011 Elif Batuman has generously bestowed her wit and intelligence and insight on journalism, and now, even more generously, on fiction. The...
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Unruly and Unerring
Jennifer SilverbergRoxane Gay, Charleston, Illinois, July 2014 Roxane Gay is a writer of extreme empathy. Her fiction and essays elicit as much shared understanding as they give. Her new memoir,...
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So Funny You Could Plotz
AP ImagesZero Mostel, Lee Meredith, and Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, 1967 Many years ago at a literary conference in Key West that focused on humor, I heard Billy Collins speak. Comedy,...
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Comic Noir
Magnum PhotosMiami, 1998; photograph by Martin Parr Paul Goldberg’s first novel, The Yid (2016), was an antic masterpiece: a screwball comedy about the assassination of Josef Stalin and a romp through...
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Bonfire of the Bathroom Vanities
Joanna NeborskyGary Shteyngart The rambunctious satires of Gary Shteyngart have previously had one foot rooting around the real-life New York City, the other foot dug into the rubble and riches of...
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Heaven Can’t Wait
Dana Schutz/Petzel, New YorkDana Schutz: God 6, 106 x 72 inches, 2013. For more on Schutz’s work, see Sanford Schwartz’s essay in this issue. I Am God is an almost outrageously charming book. In the...
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It Had to Be Her
Austrian National Library/AlamyAlma Mahler, circa 1908 Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both. Trailing a legacy of...
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The Struggle and the Scramble
Cynthia Ozick, Paris, 2005 During a 1971 debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan, immortalized in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Town Bloody Hall (1979), a small, ladylike person...
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Subjects of Considerable Gossip
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel as Anna and Marthy in the 1930 film Anna Christie Greta Garbo was born in 1905 in one of the poorest sections of Stockholm. She lived in a...
View Article‘Binding and Building’ America
In 1976 John Leonard reviewed Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts for The New York Times: Those rumbles you hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn...
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The Voyage Out
Frontispiece of Natalie Barney’s Aventures de l’Esprit, depicting the friendships among the visitors to her Paris salon, 1929 One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known...
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