The Latest:

Quiz

Are Times Tough, or Is it Possible You're Just Bohemian?

Take our simple quiz and find out!

Aisles

Case Study of the After-the-Decline Everyman

"Eggers does not insist that we care about Alan's predicament--the reader sometimes gets the impression that Alan himself wouldn't much care, were it not for his daughter's endangered future--but we do care. Alan is our after-the-decline Everyman." A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers. Review by Jennifer Ruth.

Europe Endless

Gifts in Munich

"My friend, Max, chalked it up to modern art and explained that he preferred the Neue Pinokothek, the museum that housed the Bavarian State's collection of paintings and sculptures spanning the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries..." By Elizabeth Lopeman

Aisles

Ripples Refract the Shell: Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies

"Like all pointillism, no matter how fine the points, gaps remain. This is not realism, but not wholly abstract. It is an attempt that reveals all failures of articulation. And those are, finally, the meaning of the text." By Benjamin Craig

Aisles

Raymond Queneau and the Pleasure of Discovery

"There are 99 exercises in the original collection, and ten more that Queneau suggested as substitutions or published elsewhere. The exercises read like flashes of light that illuminate for a moment the linguistic contraptions and conventions under the hood of any number of written forms and genres." By Alan Limnis

Mostly Novels

Family Tragicomic: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

"As time goes on, the young Bechdel trusts less and less that what she observes is truth. To 'save time,' she invents a symbol to stand in for the phrase 'I think.' It's not long before entire entries are covered over with this symbol." By Emily Burns Morgan

Aisles

Slowly removing the Realism: John Banville's Ancient Light

"Banville's interest is in digging into a moment--an image, a feeling, a posture, a mood, or all of those things fused in a moment of resonant perception--and capturing it so well that we simply hunger for the next moment. His means of readerly seduction is style." By Dan DeWeese

The Conventionalist

Living Past the End of the Myth: Anne Carson's Red Doc>

"How did the media get to be like this? Why do we objectify the environment? The questions of the mythic characters are familiar because they're our own. We as readers should know the answers--we're presumably older and the era seems more ours than theirs--but like the characters, we haven't 'got outside the circle of [our] mistakes.'" By Patrick McGinty

Revisited

Tan Knight in a Red Ferrari: Rewatching Magnum, P.I.

"But real talk, ladies: If you met Magnum in a bar and he confessed that the Ferrari wasn't his and that he lives for free in a mansion owned by a guy no one ever sees (and you know he'd charmingly admit this and then slyly turn the confession back to you), would that stop you from sleeping with him? I didn't think so." By Jessica Machado

The Listener

"On Record": A Film by Chloe Woida

Chatting with record collectors about vinyl, tactility, and that particular sound. By Chloe Woida

Mostly Novels

Strange and Alienated: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels

"The word Thompson chooses to describe the Angels' underlying condition is perhaps ironic, given that it is a central term in the Marxist philosophy they abhor: alienation." By Emily Burns Morgan

Poems

Six Poems By Melissa Dickey

"Face," "Prelude," and "Vision" from Dickey's book The Lily Will (Rescue Press, 2011) along with three brand new poems.

Film

The Foreign in the Familiar: Unheimlich and the films of the Quay Brothers

"In a scatter of chairs in front of one screen, a fellow has, I think, fallen asleep. Taking a seat behind him, I'm backlit, and my shadow, taller than I am, strikes me as sinister, as if I've become some broken decaying object in one of these films." By Sarah Kruse

Revisited

The 20's we never had but remember fondly: Chasing Amy, 1997

"I had remembered Chasing Amy to be, if anything, very loyal to its time--slacker-saddled 1997. I was prepared to cringe my way through Kevin Smith's Gen-X 'whatever, man' dialogue, Joey Lauren Adams' objet du desir status and, most of all, Adams' pep-squeaky voice. What I thought was smart and cutting edge sixteen years ago I expected to find forced and trite now. But I didn't. I actually liked the whole goddamn movie. Even Adams kinda sexed me." By Jessica Machado

Film

Art form of the twentieth century.

WHO WAS BARBARA LODEN?

The Woman Cinema Forgot

Wanda and the Life of an Actual Woman
by Kate McCourt

"Wanda must rank as that cinematic rarity, a movie that really does get better—much better—as it goes along," Roger Greenspun stated in his 1971 Times review of Barbara Loden's first feature film as director. The film stands today as Loden's sole produced work of feature-length writing, directing, and lead acting—she died of cancer at the age of forty-eight, nine years after Wanda's release. The film received... more

WHat ever happened to new Hollywood?

Part I: Capital Becomes Confused
by Dan DeWeese

In October of 1967, Pauline Kael contributed an article to The New Yorker (she would become the full-time film critic there in 1968) in defense of a gangster movie she had enjoyed, but which almost nobody else had seen. Released in a small number of theaters in August, the film had received a bad review in the Times, where critic Bosley Crowther called it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that... more

Hollywood Gets Breathless

Linda Lovelace as Herself

Linda Lovelace as Herself

The Cultural Symbol Who Wanted to be a Human Being
by Sarah Marshall

Some films haunt you. My mother saw Vertigo for the first time at ten, and the story—of Kim Novak as the icily sensual woman-in-trouble whom Jimmy Stewart fails to save from fate's grasp—has captivated her since. I grew up watching it with her at least once a year, lying on our living room floor in front of the sickly green glow of the screen. My father has a similar obsession with Amadeus (when I was... more

The Influence of Anxiety

Love and Death and Woody Allen (Part 1)
by Benjamin Craig

Woody Allen is regarded alternately as a cinematic genius with a singular vision, and as a deeply flawed jackass who can't make a film without embedding it with his personal neuroses and eccentricities. Both of these are probably fair assessments of the man. When Allen, as Alvy Singer, stares into the camera for the opening monologue of Annie Hall and, for a moment, we are deceived into believing it is... more

An Artist's Manic References