In Conversation

Everyone must, at some point, stand before art as an idiot. Which is to say that there remains for everyone a form of art they will first encounter both as an adult and a stranger…

A dark, alarming Futurism lurks behind the logic of drone strikes, big data, and the Austerity Sequester, one that eliminates minority dissent in favor of the predictive and precisive tools of technocracy. Soon enough (I hope) we’ll see contemporary fiction’s response to this turn of events; in the meantime, we have the films and commentaries of Thom Andersen…

If there can be such a thing as a staff un-pick, I present Jean-Antoine Houdon’s La Frileuse, who can be found shivering…

The fourth annual Festival Neue Literatur, New York’s first and only German-language literary festival, took place at an array of packed venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn last week, including Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, McNally Jackson bookstore, and Deutsches Haus … Continued

Is the revenge monologue a feminine art?

How Publishing is Rigged is a now-defunct blog, penned by a literary industry outsider. Its goal: “Once you get familiar with what’s available at How Publishing Is Rigged, you’ll witness that publishing is controlled by a handful of individuals and … Continued

If you comb through the Google Internet Cache—the Roman ruins of the 21st Century— you might stumble across long-abandoned GeoCities pages, lost Usenet postings, and other defunct websites. Over a decade after they were first created, some of your co-workers’ … Continued

“From his remarkable early [blurbs] . . . through his beautifully nuanced [blurbs] of family life and the bittersweet humors of middle age and beyond, John Updike has created a body of work in the notoriously difficult form of the [blurb] to sit beside those of these distinguished American predecessors”…

It’s now a truism that “street style” photography is no longer a record of the spontaneous grace and/or preternatural weirdness of its subjects, but rather a sort of running advertorial for metropolitan belle-egoistes with disposable income and, apparently, disposable time. … Continued

In The Enigma, a documentary on the Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter (available in its entirety on Youtube), you will discover Richter’s great gift for storytelling: he is terse, tense, and wonderful, telling a story just as he plays the piano—with … Continued

These color photographs are some of the first of their kind, taken by the Lumière Brothers using an irregular screen plate filter made of dyed grains of potato starch. I was shocked by the difference between these and black and white … Continued

D : He wanted to know who sits on my throne, you know. // D : Who are your influences.

When I was living in England, a literary agent once said to me at a party, “I was born to be a literary agent: my father was a car salesman and my mother was a social worker”…

Upon arrival in France, I unpacked my little sack on the wooden floor of my new, empty bedroom…

For more than two thousand years, from ancient Greece to nineteenth century Europe, the theory of humorism dominated Western medical thought. Four different writers give their take on the humors.