Student journalists at Columbia University have extensive ongoing coverage of the Gaza solidarity encampment /www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/24/gaza-solidarity-encampment-reaches-seventh-...
LitHub reports /lithub.com/the-pen-awards-are-on-the-brink-of-collapse/> on the PEN Awards and World Voices festival, which “are on the brink of collapse” over the organization’s response t...
This Thursday at the Brooklyn Public Library, contributors to Choice Words, a collection of literature on abortion, will discuss /www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/writers-abortion-bpl> their wo...
HER PLACE IN THE WINGS Billie Holiday, née Elenora Fagan, is one of America’s few remaining antiheroes, the last surviving muse of the Jazz Age, and the only correct answer to Amiri Baraka�...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/ways-of-being-haunted-by-billie-holiday-25350
“IN THE BEGINNING God created the heaven and the earth.” You have to admit it’s a hell of an opening line. “When I think there was a day when a human first wrote those words,” Marilynne...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/marilynne-robinson-goes-back-to-the-beginning-25349
TO TRAVEL FROM Massapequa Park, a small town on Long Island, to Penn Station on the LIRR takes about an hour. It was a commute that Candy Darling made countless times between 1962, the year she t...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/the-life-of-warhol-superstar-candy-darling-25348
The Spring 2024 issue /www.bookforum.com/print/3004> of Bookforum is online now! In this edition: Christine Smallwood on Constance Debré’s novels of transformation; Joy Williams on Vladimir So...
https://www.bookforum.com/culture/the-spring-issue-of-bookforum-is-online-now-25347
WANT TO FEEL OLD? Some Americans born during the 2008 financial crisis will be getting their driver’s licenses this year. These youngest Zoomers have never known an America where serious peopl...
THE NOSTALGIA AMONG LIBERALS for the Obama presidency has lately crested such that it’s a surprise that proposals to overturn the 22nd Amendment haven’t gained traction, even in the fantasy r...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/vinson-cunningham-s-novel-of-the-obama-campaign-25354
AARON BUSHNELL WAS a twenty-five-year-old active Air Force member, employed as a cybersecurity expert. After growing up in a conservative religious sect on Cape Cod, he joined the US military a ...
YOU KNOW KEITH HARING. He drew breakdancers and mushroom clouds and triclops and dicks and death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T. Jones and on Grace Jones...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/how-keith-haring-got-his-halo-25342
AVRIL HORNER BEGINS A Savage Innocence, the first biography of the English novelist Barbara Comyns, with the story of her parents’ non-courtship. Once upon a time, a mustachioed man named Alber...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/an-english-novelist-s-art-of-getting-by-25341
HELEN OYEYEMI’S NEW NOVEL Parasol Against the Axe, set amid a bachelorette party weekend in Prague, abounds in side quests breezily undertaken and abandoned. You don’t need to think about th...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/helen-oyeyemi-s-story-within-a-story-within-a-story-25338
MEET THE CAST: David Crader, a washed-up child actor, author of the celebrity memoir that constitutes the bulk of Justin Taylor’s second novel, Reboot; Amber, David’s long-suffering second e...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/justin-taylor-s-novel-takes-on-the-celebrity-memoir-25337
Building on Artforum's fifty-year reputation established by its sister magazine, ARTFORUM, BOOKFORUM brings you incisive reviews of the latest titles, illuminating author interviews, and intelligent commentary. Here you will find current and coming trends and ideas celebrated and debated by some of the most innovative writers of our time.
THE DILIGENT Prussian bureaucrat E. T. A. Hoffmann had a mischievous double. By day, he worked as a jurist in the courts of present-day Poland and Germany; by night, he wrote impassioned music c...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/e-t-a-hoffmann-s-obsessive-revolt-against-reason-25352
VLADIMIR SOROKIN is genius, pure and simple. Or Daedalian. Slowly, slowly Sorokin has been introduced to us. At first he was suspected to be too “esoteric” for American tastes. Jamey Gambrel...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/vladimir-sorokin-s-high-risk-fiction-25353
LO. LEE. TA. This is the trip the tip of the tongue expects to take when reading a novel from the point of view of a man currently incarcerated following the rape of a teenage girl he’s groomed...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lucas-rijneveld-s-novel-takes-nabokov-to-the-farm-25344
THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen lan...
ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT BREAKUPS—aside, obviously, from the heartbreak and the acrimony, the division of belongings, and the general sense of loss—is their ability to make even nominall...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/two-french-authors-dueling-narratives-of-heartbreak-25345
IN TODAY'S INSTALLMENT of “You’re Never Too Old to Learn,” it turns out that it’s not just its location that makes the state of Ohio the heartland of America. It’s also because, as its ...
SOMETIMES WHAT CONSERVATIVES SEEM TO FEAR MOST from liberals is not their money or their ideology but their judgment. Beneath the vast tide of right-wing grievance, there is a current of profoun...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/lisa-selin-davis-s-confused-history-of-homemakers-25336
CONSTANCE DEBRÉ’S autobiographical novel Playboy is the story of a metamorphosis. We meet the narrator just after she has left her husband, Laurent, and started dating and having sex with wome...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/constance-debre-s-novels-of-transformation-25334
“LITERARY CRITICS do fulfill a very important role, but there seems to be a problem with much contemporary criticism,” Simon Leys once wrote. “One has the feeling that these critics do not...
ALEXANDER POPE, WROTE NICHOLSON BAKER in a roaming 1995 essay about allegorical uses of the word “lumber,” was “one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary history.�...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/nicholson-baker-learns-to-draw-25332
Lisa Borst /www.bookforum.com/contributor/lisa-borst> has been named co-EIC of n+1 /twitter.com/dtortorici/status/1778156384413970791>, joining Mark Krotov and Dayna Tortorici. Borst was formerly...
Ohio author Hanif Abdurraqib appeared /x.com/CBSMornings/status/1778054268563423680> on CBS Mornings today to discuss his new book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which m...
John Barth /www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html> has died at the age of ninety-three. Barth was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and essays and a writing professo...
https://www.bookforum.com/papertrail/remembering-john-barth-fallout-from-the-spd-closing-25330
The Guadeloupean novelist, activist, and academic Maryse Condé has died /www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/02/maryse-conde-guadelopean-grand-storyteller-dies-aged-90?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks> a...
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Melina Moe reads /lareviewofbooks.org/article/there-is-no-point-in-my-being-other-than-honest-with-you-on-toni-morrisons-rejection-letters/> some of Toni Morri...
For the Cleveland Review of Books, Mark Twain scholar Matt Seybold reviews /www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/percival-everett-james> Percival Everett /www.bookforum.com/print/2701/bookforum-talks...
Bookforum contributor and Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld discusses fairness and perspective in criticism and her forthcoming essay collection All Things Are Too Small in an
In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, novelist Sally Rooney writes /www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/03/16/killing-in-gaza-has-been-supported-by-irelands-good-friend-in-the-white-house/> ...
The UK–based Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its 2024 longlist /womensprize.com/announcing-the-2024-womens-prize-for-fiction-longlist/>, which includes Maya Binyam’s Hangman, Isabel...
Online at n+1, Erik Baker writes /www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/burnt-offerings/> about Aaron Bushnell, the US’s illegal use of incendiary weapons on civilians, and the history of
In the Yale Review, Aria Aber interviews /yalereview.org/article/fady-joudah-interview> poet Fady Joudah. Joudah wrote his latest book, , in about ten weeks beginning in October 2023. He tells
Maggie Doherty reviews /www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/carson-mccullers-a-life-mary-v-dearborn-book-review> Mary V. Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lon...
Next Monday at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn Heights, novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley will discuss /www.eventbrite.com/e/in-store-sloane-crosley-grief-is-for-people-w-sigrid-nunez-tickets-7937...
Tricia Romano, whose oral history /www.perseusbooks.com/titles/tricia-romano/the-freaks-came-out-to-write/9781541736399/> of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice is out now, has written a
Medaya Ocher has been named the new editor-in-chief /twitter.com/LAReviewofBooks/status/1754958553922809965> of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Previously, Ocher was the managing editor and seni...
The Winter 2024 issue /www.bookforum.com/print/3003> of Bookforum is online now! Subscribe /subscriptions.bookforum.com/> today to get the print edition as soon as possible, and donate here /
https://www.bookforum.com/papertrail/the-new-issue-of-bookforum-rosa-lyster-on-janet-flanner-25317
IN A 2014 INTERVIEW with Entropy Magazine, poet-filmmaker-scholar-anarcho-feminist-writer and dreamer Jackie Wang apologetically names a “piece of art that has recently undone/inspired you” ...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3003/critics-reflect-on-the-best-art-books-of-2023-25304
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL was for most of the previous century a golden icon, an aspirational myth of grand and glittering proportions. Though he never attained that grail, Seymour Krim, an ardent
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3003/john-a-williams-s-unsung-novel-25303
IT IS A FITTING IRONY that when trying to describe Anne Carson’s sensibility, one quickly hits the limits of language. To measure the breadth of her brain across her twenty or so books, one mi...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3003/anne-carson-s-unruly-art-of-renewal-25302
AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGMENT, I opened Twitter on an evening walk. The first thing I saw was about a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian in Turkey who had died of a heart attack after being unable t...
FILMMAKER ANNA BILLER begins her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, with a warning: “Some husbands,” she writes, “are pussycats, some are dullards or harmless rogues, and some are Bluebear...
LAZY CITY, RACHEL CONNOLLY’S EXACTING and wise debut novel, is a chronicle of echoes. Connolly tells the tale of two absences: Kate’s, a graduate student who dies before the book begins; an...
WHILE READING KATYA APEKINA’S spellbinding sophomore novel, Mother Doll, I kept wondering who its protagonist, Irina Petrova, the feisty, over-the-top spirit of a deceased Russian revolutionary...
BY NOW IT’S CLEAR that the academic humanities—that supposedly disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, preserved from the whims of the market—are under threat. But that threat...
https://www.bookforum.com/print/3003/lars-iyer-reconfigures-the-campus-novel-25297
Building on Artforum's fifty-year reputation established by its sister magazine, ARTFORUM, BOOKFORUM brings you incisive reviews of the latest titles, illuminating author interviews, and intelligent commentary. Here you will find current and coming trends and ideas celebrated and debated by some of the most innovative writers of our time.