From the 2018 Chapman University Survey of American Fears. The list is included in Fear Itself, by Christopher D. Bader, Joseph O. Baker, L. Edward Day, and Ann Gordon, published this…
Stages of Life and Death within the Landscape and Still Life, a painting by Mimi Lauter, whose work will be on view in March at Blum & Poe, in New…
From his prose poem, Underworld Lit, which will be published in August by Wave Books. Though my catalog search under “postpartum depression” turns up everything from Euripides’ Medea to the…
In tracing the pedigree of the American conservative movement we must note that from, say, 1935 to 1955 (from the rise of Father Coughlin to the demise of Joseph McCarthy),…
It is 1924. Günter Zeitz is thirty-three years old. His hair is black, unruly. And, in the manner of certain very tall men, he habitually hunches his shoulders and lets…
Dantor a Anais and Sanité Bélair, mixed-media artworks by Didier William, whose work is on view this month at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in Hartford, Connecticut. Courtesy the…
From Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, a book of short stories including previously uncollected work, published this month by Amistad. “L ooka heah Cal’line, you oughta stop dis heah…
As of this writing, we are still about three months away from the first vote of the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination—and already “our side” seems set to tear…
From Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, a collection of essays published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The other day I was asked a question of fact…
As promised in the email she’d received, the shuttle was waiting at the curb outside baggage claim. It was just a minivan, it turned out, not the wheeled and finned…
Just over an hour after he had been threatened with assassinationin Sacramento, President Ford spoke about the troubling rise in crime in the United States. The little of his remarks…
By Jean Genet, from The Criminal Child: Selected Essays, published this month by NYRB Classics. This text is an abridged version of the essay “The Criminal Child,” which was commissioned…
“Untitled (Forest 2),” a photograph by Sandra Kantanen, whose work was on view in November at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, in New York City. Kantanen’s monograph, More Landscapes, was published last…
Nurses with Wine, a painting by Alex Kanevsky, whose work was on view in September at Hollis Taggart, in New York City. © Private collection. Courtesy the artist and Hollis…