Review by Eddie Baker
David Wojnarowicz’s recent Whitney retrospective—aptly titled History Keeps Me Awake at Night—bespeaks the lapses and pitfalls that come with digging into the past. Wojnarowicz, catapulting gloriously between the mediums of collage, sculpture, photography, painting, writing, and No Wave music, called into question the cultural mythologies that shape the writing of history. Inhabiting the very periphery of American life, Wojnarowicz operated from the privileged yet precarious position of the outsider. “I have always felt alienated in this country,” he writes in his memoir Close To the Knives, “and thus have lived with the sensation of being an observer of my own life as it occurs.” Living with HIV at a time when widespread misinformation and government neglect forced AIDS patients to the margins of society, Wojnarowicz struggled to voice his personal account of AIDS with volume, urgency, and accuracy. His work demands an uncompromising history of the AIDS crisis. And so it is crucial to ask: How did the Whitney and the exhibition’s framing of Wojnarowicz’s work engage with this history?
Reviewed by Christopher Fletcher
I read João Gilberto Noll’s two novels The Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel in swift succession on a rainy afternoon, a reading punctuated with the heavy sound of the light rail moving alongside. I finished one and immediately started the other, reading until it was time to move on. For weeks after, I rued that marathon reading session as I tried to disentangle the plots in my mind. Atlantic Hotel featured a narrator nearing middle-age trundling from room to room in search of himself. Quiet Creature featured a young narrator being bundled from place to place as he waits to come into his own. Or was it the other way around?
Review by Adam Z. Levy
Published in Hungarian in 2008, nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, László Krasznahorkai’sSeiobo There Below depicts a search for the sacred in a sprawling, indifferent, borderless world in its current moment of decay...
Review by Jonathan Sudholt
Bleeding Edge is Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel, and he turns his attention to a “post-late capitalist” military-industrial complex that is all grown up...
Review by Morten Høi Jensen
As a character in Javier Marías's The Infatuations likes to remind us, it is not the plot of a novel that is important—what happens is so easily forgotten—but rather the “possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with”...
Review by Jeff Bursey
The cover of Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 may entice. It’s of a young woman happily reading a book while lying nude on her bed. No men disturb her bedroom pursuit of pleasure...
Review by Madeleine LaRue
Anne Carson's Red Doc>, though populated by visionaries and prophets, is in part about the undoing of that youthful action, about learning not to see...
Review by Ian Patterson
Iva Bittová’s eclecticism is evident on her debut as leader for ECM, an intimate solo performance where her voice blends with violin and kalimba in an intoxicating brew that is both ethereal and invigoratingly rootsy...
Review by Cecil Lytle
Matthew Guerrieri’s The First Four Notes takes on the task of unraveling the meaning and mystery of that reverberative quartet of notes that have made Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Opus 67) an iconic symbol...
Review by K. Thomas Kahn
Cees Nooteboom’s poetic prose fuses reality and dreams in uncanny ways that often mirror prosaically what Max Neumann does visually...
Review by Christiane Craig
Beneath the surface chaos of its many narratives, Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair would appear fractal in its logic...
Review by Bethany W. Pope
How do we distinguish, George Szirtes asks in Bad Machine, between the physical form, which passes away, and the spark—or, according to one poem, smoke—that sets us apart from other animals?
