The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission. Then his daughter died. Then he got dropped by his publisher. Then he got hit by a car. Then he got a pulmonary embolism. But things are looking up. William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

Ross Douthat’s Sandbox Universe: On Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in his Catholicism, or even in Christianity. Instead, he aims at a wider target, arguing in favor of believing in God and joining a religion. Believe is not a treatise on why religion is good for you as a person, or good for society. Instead, Douthat writes that it is “especially important now to defend not just the spiritual but the religious — meaning not just the experience of the numinous but the attempt to think rationally about it, not just the personal pursuit of the mystical but faith’s structured and communal forms, not just ideas about how one might encounter something worthy of the name of God but ideas about what such a God might want from us.” Accordingly, the first three chapters argue for the factual truth of religious ideas like God, the soul, and spiritual experiences. The next three chapters make an argument that established, organized religion is the right response to these claims. A final, more personal chapter details Douthat’s own specifically Christian beliefs.

The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force. “In my view,” she writes, “bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives.” We’ll get back to this notion soon. But let me first briefly note what else might have got mentioned in that short elevator ride shared by Manne’s agent and publisher. It would surely have been clarified that the book is not about fatphobia in general, but about the intersectional experience of fatphobia on the part of women and girls. Eating disorders and harmful dieting will have been said, in that elevator, to be a feature of misogynist societies in particular. There are undoubtedly gendered dimensions of the problem. Yet too much emphasis on these can obscure from view just how varied judgments about the goodness or badness of fat can be in different times and places, and can also conceal from us many of the genuinely universal problems, philosophical and practical, of human embodiment. This latter point has considerable personal importance to me. When I was a young man, just 19 years old, I began a two-year bout of rather severe anorexia, constantly in and out of hospitals and psychiatrists’ offices, hooked up to IV’s, fretted over. I was six feet tall and I weighed 99 pounds. I purged myself with laxatives and diuretics every morning before my weigh-in. If the scale ever crept up past 100, I doubled down on my efforts at self-starvation.

“Ten Years of Useless Labor”: On Danzy Senza’s Colored Television

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” and “inclusion” in post-2020 America. Senna has traversed this terrain for a quarter-century in fiction and memoir, deploying a mix of dark humor, historical insight, and pop-culture fluency to craft narratives of biracial women and men — or, to use the term she prefers, mulattos. On that model, Colored Television features quotations from Jefferson’s letters, parodies of mid-century sociology texts, meditations on Carol Channing, cameos by Kim and Kanye. But this collage of content is held together by forms and themes as old as the novel itself — mimetic desire, status-chasing, and marital troubles, to name a few. Much of the plot is set in motion by a scene that could have been ripped from the pages of Balzac, Dreiser, or Richard Wright, not to mention Cervantes: A woman sees an image of a happy family in a sales catalog, and tries to make her own life look like theirs. Personal and professional mayhem ensues, much of it very funny. Senna’s relentless cynicism will likely titillate the readers of the Good Morning America Book Club, but it also hamstrings her capacities as a social critic.

The Magic Eye: On the Art (and Life) of Joan Mitchell

A couple years ago, I got the idea that I should spend a week in Paris by myself. Considering I have a boyfriend who could have gone with me and that, perhaps more pertinently, I don’t speak French, the decision was confusing to a handful of people I know. I was satisfied by my own reasoning for the trip — I wanted to travel alone, to be in a situation in which I’m entirely out of my element, at least once while I’m young. Also, JetBlue had a sale. Still, I could read the awkwardness in their eyes, the real questions not being asked, when they’d look at me and carefully go, “So… what are you going to do there?” Really, what I wanted to do there was see the Joan Mitchell paintings at the Centre Pompidou. I’d still never seen a piece of hers in person then, the frenetic swipes and smears which I loved so much observed only ever through my various screens. A depressing thought! While it hadn’t been part of my decision to take the trip, in my loose planning it came to hold a kind of post-hoc, kismet-like significance for me — a chance to finally commune with Mitchell, my fellow Chicagoan-turned-New-Yorker, in the country that she made her ultimate home.

Toward a Sordid Utopia?: On Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

Stalking the Trillion-Footed Digital Beast: On Udith Dematagoda’s Agonist

Whatever your feelings about the internet and its tortuous torrential stream of information, misinformation, fragments of dialogue, rants, advertisements, etc., it is, for better or worse — good or evil — totalizing in its effects, and here to stay. Social media, as part of the online ecosystem, has made its own insidious specific contributions as part of this “world wide web” (as the internet used to be called) and users have no qualms about exposing their lives online. Tens of millions of people panic about how to share their “hot takes” or transform their little acts of daily living, no matter how banal, into posts, and then sit and desperately wait for approval, counting the “likes” they receive to tally up their sense of self-worth.

It Wasn’t Real, But It Was Beautiful: On the WWE Holiday Tour Live and Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I went alone to the WWE Holiday Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, where I sat in nosebleed seats. I wore a plaid button-down shirt and black jeans. I listened to “Danza Kuduro” on repeat on the half-hour walk from my apartment. My life was stable for the first time in two years. I was twenty-nine, living in New York after a nearly ten year hiatus, and dating a wonderful medical student at the University of Michigan who loved me very much. Everything was good. But I hadn’t finished writing my book and editors often edged me on whether my short stories would make it into their magazines (Not this story, but maybe the next one? Keep submitting to us!). I loved the medical student, but sometimes worried about our relationship. We never fought! Was that good? Or did it hint at some pliability of his that was a weakness of character? Back in New York, I felt like an animal free for the first time. I wanted to see men pound each other on the aptly named Boxing Day.

Torture, Survivorship, and the Lens of Youth: On RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of black youth, one idealistic, the other cynical, who are snatched from their families and placed into a juvenile reformatory where students are routinely tortured. The story is a fiction based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida where violent crimes against students were regularly committed — and with students suffering many of the exact same tortures that were perpetrated on their ancestors by white hands. Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s, and partially in the 2010s, where one of the characters revisits his trauma through news articles online. Like the novel on which it is based, the film is well done. The visuals are pretty and it is worth streaming. It is a hard task to confront brutal history and shape it into something truthful yet palatable, let alone entertaining.

Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself: On Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez

When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone they have been wrong. I was kind of hoping this would be true for Emilia Pérez, but about ten minutes into the film I realized this was unlikely to work out, and what I would be left restating was everyone has said. Emilia Pérez! What the fuck?! Let’s just get some stuff out of the way. It’s the story of a violent Mexican narco who fakes his death, goes to Israel for surgery to transition as a woman, attempts to regain a connection to her children, and tries to atone for her past by establishing a nonprofit to help those whose lives have been impacted by narco violence. It’s a French production set in Mexico with almost zero Mexican people working on the film. Also it’s a musical. And on Netflix.

Stand Up for Better Oscar Bait: On Edward Berger’s Conclave

The mother of all costume dramas. Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be surrounded by absolutely fabulous art, by marble columns reaching up high over the top of the frame, by the sea of cardinal red. If we don’t have much in the way of sex or violence, the dopamine receptors in our brain will be lit up by cardinals, and here the film’s producers are really onto something. Archbishops don’t do it, even popes somehow don’t quite do it, but imagine being poolside in Hollywood and picturing this project: an entire College of Cardinals, gathering for a cardinal conclave, all in cardinal red, with round red cardinal hats and red cardinal suits and sometimes special cardinal mitres, all going about their cardinal controversies, and then, as the last drunken archbishop totters away with the Swiss Guards closing the gates behind him, the cardinals are sequestered, so that (except for the kitchen staff, who keep annoyingly intruding into the narrative in order to provide some gender balance) they are only ever interacting with other cardinals, getting onto special buses in which the only other passengers are cardinals, staying in special cardinal hotels that look well like it might be the set of John Wick but now booked-out entirely for cardinals, and if it happens to rain at any point in the film then the entire conclave will be issued with special white cardinal umbrellas that, needless to say, when glimpsed from a balcony shot, color-coordinate perfectly with the red cardinal outfits as they sashay slowly forward to the accompaniment of string instruments.

Architecting a Myth: On the Brutalism of The Brutalist

I wonder if László Tóth escaped the Nazis by jumping out of a prison transport train? Director Brady Corbet does not tell us how Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish émigré in America, survived the Holocaust in his epic The Brutalist. But towards the beginning of the film, Tóth mentions that he broke his nose jumping from a train car, while mistaking as gunfire the sound of bone cracking against a tree. Perhaps Tóth, as an architect and aesthete, would appreciate how Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl described a trip in a Nazi prison train as a rare opportunity to experience beauty: As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor — or maybe because of it — we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

Maybe on Corbet’s cutting room floor, there’s a scene where Tóth got lucky, and the bars on his train car window broke off during the journey. The wispy man would have been slender enough to launch himself out of a small opening, once the train slowed just enough to risk it. Even if the attempt killed him, at least he would die on an awesome mountainside instead of inside the next camp.

But Tóth jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Corbet barrages us with so much trauma throughout the film — adultery, poverty, betrayal, famine, rape, addiction, young children losing their mothers, disease, more rape, overdose, suicide, the woman who became mute because her pain was unspeakable — that including the Holocaust on screen would have been gratuitous. As historical backdrop, it merely hovers behind the story until the epilogue, when Tóth’s life’s work is celebrated at the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Then we learn that the layout of the monumental Brutalist building that Tóth designs and builds throughout the film is based on his prison in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but with a twist — he gives the cramped rooms high ceilings meant to inspire hope.

Teenage Dreaming: On Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will be Girls

You ride a tattered scooter. You wear clothes that are either too baggy or too tight. You won’t shave. You flirt with Marxism. You hate capitalism. You believe you’re misunderstood. You’re mad at mom and dad because you think they don’t get you. No one gets you, and you know no one gets you, but something about them not getting you frustrates you greatly. You’re always fighting. They have dreams. You have dreams. And as you grow older you have stumbled upon that half-awkward, wholly painful realization that your dreams might differ from their dreams. You think you’re hopelessly lost, but the romance of that listlessness hasn’t set in. You like Pink Floyd and Metallica, until a girl with kaleidoscope eyes sits frightfully close to you and shares one of her two earbuds and forces you to listen to Nada Surf. Your world changes. As the lyrics of a song that you feel like you’ve known for a lifetime and many lifetimes envelop you, your world certifiably changes. The sun sets. You share furtive glances with one another. There is an ineffable desire, a desire that you haven’t yet the vocabulary for, to hold her hand. You slightly shamefully extend your pinkie, or let it linger on your walk back home, with her by your side. And the rest becomes history.

Thirsty for Piss: On Joker: Folie à Deux and Megalopolis

When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost TimeM. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul. I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits. We have no problem seeing this as a dumb, bloated — if ambitious — idea.

Shame, Sex, and the Female Body: On The Substance and Babygirl

“The particular greatness of movies,” Pauline Kael once wrote, is the power to connect with us “emotionally … in spite of our thinking selves.” I’m never going to be swept away by films that are treatises, feminist or otherwise. Tell me a good story whose ending I can’t predict. Make me weep. Make me smile with pleasure. Turn me on. Give me one delicious image. Let me leave the theatre pondering what I’ve just seen. Break my heart. Just don’t lecture me. The Substance and Babygirl: Two films by female writer/directors, both inspired by the experience of living in a female body in a culture that instills shame and self-hatred in us. It’s an evergreen theme for feminists; we’ve been writing about it (though only occasionally making movies about it) since the dawn of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960’s, and freshening the ideas up is a challenge.