Freedom in a Box: On Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love

I spent the entire day at the Met and it wasn’t enough. Unsurprisingly, because of the sheer volume of pieces, and beyond that — endlessly more frustrating — because no later than lunch smoke was coming out of my ears. I was exhausted. I had tried to prioritize, to start easy on the second floor, strolling through the European paintings and focusing on the wings I wouldn’t have access to back home. But I got stuck in the drawings before the Europeans even started. I was in front of Matisse’s Jazz series and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Something stopped me dead in my tracks.

The Last Useful Man: On Tom Cruise and the Case for Embodied Knowledge

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

Water on Stone: A Short Story on Pity

She had been telling me a story for most of our date, a story that seemed half-truth, half-lie. I wasn’t sure how we got on the topic, but I didn’t dislike listening to her speak. The woman was a lover, but she was not a friend. She existed in that hazy space between passion and convenience. She twirled her little brown braid around her index finger — she had pianist hands — and looked at me with her wet, green eyes. Her eyes had a certain blank hopefulness that reminded me of cow eyes.

The British Spiritual Twilight: On Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings

In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the coming-of-age story of Hollinghurst’s gay, half-Burmese protagonist. Raised by his white, working-class single mother in an austere market town, Win lives out the arc of a queer British Bildungsroman.

Giant of the Attic: On the Majesty of Alan Moore

Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.“ I use it to work,” as he told Alex Musson. “Always have done.” Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it. Life of a novelist now. Solitude.

“Thanksgiving Turkey” and “Madame X’s Lesson”

As Nassim Taleb had it, waiting for the ax, / a man stretching past the farthest tendrils of his ken, / lovers of liars, stargazers in the war, / candles burning bright and so on. / The truth is that we pity the Thanksgiving Turkey not for the ax / but for the easy life before it, / or not the ease exactly but the haplessness
of livestock, / fenced off from meaning, / a cave life, / perhaps seeing truth for the first time / in the specular shine of an ax already / night skied with the blood of her sisters, / when on a November day, amid the colors, / the turkey in fact learns that the past was prelapsarian . . .

My Father’s Picture: On the Possibility of an Image

The picture before me was taken from an unknown building looking out on an unknown street. The one bare tree visible from across the street is touched by recent snowfall, as is the large electric pole with its wires stretching high above ground. My father must have taken this photo at the very latest in 1932, which is when he left his homeland never to return. A few weeks before his death in New York, as we were leafing through old photographs, I asked him why he had taken that picture from the sunken basement window that peered out on the street.

The Greatest: On the Wonderful Mystery of Janet Malcolm

Looking over my notes for this career-spanning essay on Janet Malcolm, I find many of them less helpful than I hoped, consisting as they do mostly of phrases like “hell yeah,” “absolutely beautiful,” “brilliant writing,” “so so so perfect,” “how does she do it,” and so forth. Practitioners of a certain type of literary nonfiction speak her name in hushed tones and with a sense of holy awe. Katie Roiphe, who has quite consciously positioned herself as Malcolm’s inheritor, called her “the only living writer who terrified me.”

The Solitary: A Novel Excerpt

A long table took up most of the room, and around it sat 16 men. As a group, they had a wild and wasted look, with skeletal limbs, hollow cheeks, unshorn beards, and fixed stares. Maurice submitted to the scrutiny of this assembly of saints like a martyr to the flames. His salvation depended on his winning a place among them. At the head of the table, Apa Zeno, the holy father of the colony, looked off vacantly and scratched himself. To his right sat his deputy, Elias, who raised a hand.

A Novel in the Bardo: On Amie Barrodale’s Trip

I discovered the writing of Amie Barrodale in my college English class while reading an old Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, whose short story collection, Homesick for Another World, I’d just read. As my professor lectured to braindead twentysomethings about a medieval Persian poet, I scrolled to the bottom of the page where the interviewer asks Moshfegh if there’s a writer she looks up to, and Moshfegh responds with a recommendation of her friend Amie Barrodale’s story collection, You Are Having a Good Time.

The High-Romantic Nightmare That Wasn’t: On Del Toro’s Frankenstein

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story.

“Astronomy” and “Carousel Animals Before Restoration”

Moonrise over ocean horizon. My father / teaches me to shoot / photos through a telescope, craters and ridges / rise like pockmarked skin / beneath a fluorescent light. This was now. I loved / the night lilies. The tigers, too, / that grew in my father’s garden, the way / something was always / awake, waiting. / I gathered worms and black swimming beetles / from the backyard pool / into jars of water. Look at them dance! I told him. / They’re carnivores, he informed me. / What did I know / about cruelty then, how accidental it could be?

The Engine of Waking Life: On Depression and Teaching

I don’t want to write about teaching high school English. But I need to write about being depressed. And for me those experiences cannot be neatly cleft, like conjoined twins whose shared skin shelters so much blood. I once worked as a kid actor and kept at it until I was 23. I felt burnt out, lost, and useless. I filled my days with reading, using my newfound time to try to brute-force my way through a classical education. Then I read a charming essay by Salvatore Scibona about St. John’s, a small liberal arts college in New Mexico focused on reading and discussing great books.

Why Woolf?: On Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions.

The Nonfiction Artist: A Photo Essay by Max Vadukul: Never-Before-Seen Portraits of Gay Talese

I shot these portraits of Gay Talese in the spring of 2015 and they’ve been unjustly sitting in my archives ever since. I shot them for a small men’s magazine, but for some reason, they only ended up using two pictures, and I’ve always felt it was criminal these portraits never saw the light of day. I still remember the afternoon that I visited Gay at his Upper East Side townhouse. He was wearing his signature fedora, bespoke Oxford shoes, and a Brioni suit. He’s someone who dresses for his role in the world, like a policeman, a monk, or a judge.