An annotated table of contents for Issue 16: Double Bind, out now and available as a digital edition and in print. Featuring Bruce Robbins on Étienne Balibar, a report on the Merce Cunningham archives, Emily Witt on pornography, love, and Google, and John Colpitts, AKA Kid Millions of the band Oneida. Become a digital and/or print subscriber now to read the whole issue. More…
The student in you, the teacher in you, the reader in you, and the writer in you are all jostling each other in excitement. This produces some elation. Ideas have been circulated, affirmed, and expanded on. Is this what collegiality is? You think: I should come to this thing every year! Your inner Elaine Stritch is holding a scotch aloft and intoning “Everybody riiiiiiiiiiiiiise!” More…
Thirty-five words from Issue 16, “Double Bind,” in order of frequency: No. Cunningham. [Princess] Donna. Balibar. Munro. Haneke. Space. Police. Porn. Oneida. Tour. Indian. Google. Insurrection. Class. Desire. Power. Technique. Surveillance. Sadomodernism. Disgrace. Sabotage. “Irregardless.” Torture. Sandwich. Naive. Unpleasant. Unknown. Uh. Vaginas. Vacations. More…
For the lifelong female reader, the fault line between the unquestioned dominance of female writers who write for children and the defensive posture of women who write so-called literary fiction for adults arrives abruptly in adolescence. After reluctantly shelving Madeline L’Engle or Susan Cooper or E. Nesbit the female reader reaches into the twentieth-century canon for The Bell Jar. More…
On Facebook, I take some cheap shots at Sarah Palin and the multibillion-dollar, publicly traded behemoth decides I’d like to see . . . ads promoting Mitt Romney. Missed again, you corporate motherfuckers! says the little voice inside my head. Your marketing will never catch me! Of course, it eventually will. It already kind of does. A fleeting invitation to a gout study snares me. Did I post something fatty? More…
the summer before last/ I got lost in berlin/ this was in/ Tiergarten/ I found myself/ in an absolutely empty square/ and all around was forest/ and the square was empty/ I saw a guy/ riding his bike/ and ran over to him/ and asked in english/ how to get to the center of town/ he was really happy to see me/ because he turned out to be a russian immigrant/ he got off his bike/ and started giving me directions More…
On the last day of the year, we give you twelve of our favorite pieces from 2012, including the feminist argument against privacy, a monumental history of the New York Public Library, four poems, a philosophy of hockey, a survey of the novels of the Theory Generation, remembrances of Shulamith Firestone, two views of the storm in Brooklyn, and a wild denunciation of men and magazines. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 15: Amnesty, out now and available as a digital edition and in print. Featuring Lawrence Jackson vs. the Slickheads, a report from the Anders Behring Breivik trial, Kristin Dombek on sex, drugs, and Ryan Gosling, and an Intellectual Situation that takes on Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review. Become a digital and/or print subscriber now to read the whole issue. More…
The women who comment at the Hairpin tend to be a positive group, given to complimenting the editors and thanking the authors of personal essays for sharing. But they filed 813 overwhelmingly negative comments in a thread linking to the article, many of them speculating as to what my real problem was. Here are some suggestions. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 14, featuring the editors against credentialism; an argument for sex class action; essays about street food and gentrification, a crisis at the New York Public Library, and the secret history of Joaquin Phoenix; reviews of the flatness of 3D and the theory generation; new fiction by Yelena Akhtiorskaya; a new controversies section; and much more. More…
Liz Hynes speaks with Caleb Crain and Charles Petersen about the NYPL’s Central Library Plan. A public discussion of the subject took place last night, May 22, at the New School’s Theresa Lang Community Center. Panelists included NYPL President Anthony Marx, historian Joan Wallach Scott, and architectural historian Mark Alan Hewitt. More…
Norman Foster’s preliminary plans for the library have not yet been made public. According to a former staff member who has seen them, Foster’s design may well call for the demolition of not just the stacks but of much of the marble facade that stands on the Bryant Park side of the main library. In the facade’s place, we will likely see some kind of ambitious new glass entrance. More…
The New York Public Library has announced a plan to remake its landmark building on 42nd Street. As Joshua Steiner, vice chairman of the board of trustees, put it in 2008, the renovation in many way represents the “further democratization” of the library. By contrast, a staff member with whom I spoke called the plan “the destruction of the research library.” More…
The fierce need to be loved that Miss Brodie fails to fight is a heavy weight I’ve felt these last three years. How can you change lives without being trusted? (You can’t.) How can students learn if they don’t feel comfortable in your classroom? (They can’t.) How can you motivate students who are unmotivated by grades and not interested in literature if they don’t even like the woman standing in the front of the room? More…
After reading Lost Illusions all winter I hated the idea of youth and being young, so I turned to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim—a novel about a 25-year-old who seems to have no dreams left at all—as a corrective. Two thirds of the way through the book, another character gives him some of the best advice I’ve ever heard. More…
The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server. Sitting in the Materials Research Lab among hulking, warmly breathing Xerox Sigma V processors, Hart went on to input and share, with a quixotic singularity of purpose, text after text. More…
My first audiobook was Flo Gibson’s recording of The Mill on the Floss, which, by the way, is one of the very great audiobooks: the sound is scratchy, but Gibson’s voice is confident and almost conspiratorial, warm and intimate and pleased to be recounting a story she knows you will be glad to have heard. I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears. More…
Daniel Smith and n+1 editor Keith Gessen talk about Gessen’s article for Vanity Fair, “The Book on Publishing” (October 2011). This article uses Chad Harbach’s book The Art of Fielding as a lens to examine developments in print and electronic publishing. Keith and Daniel discuss what these changes mean for the industry, the authors, and the reading public. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 13, featuring Astra Taylor on education outside the school system, Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on the fate of progressive literary culture, an excerpt from Benjamin Kunkel’s new play, a report from Franco Moretti’s literary lab, a collective portrait of the Occupy movement and argument for a left populism, and much more. More…
In this episode Liz Hynes talks with Chad Harbach about his new novel, The Art of Fielding, exploring themes of mimetic desire, Herman Melville, and male friendship on and off the baseball field. More…
Ellen Willis wrote a lot about music, but she wrote a lot more about failure. Although she is mostly remembered as a music critic, she was also a radical feminist, and radical feminism’s greatest intellectual historian. If we are going to understand what happened to women’s liberation—what pushed it underground, unraveled many of its achievements, and nearly erased it from cultural memory—Willis’s work is indispensable. More…
Maybe it was just their generation. Because it seems like younger women don’t have that same problem. My mother just hates this book! She says: “Lightning Rods! Ah! I hate that book!” Then when it got a publisher, she said, “I’m going to try to read it again.” My loyal mother! And so then she got up to “tight, wet twat” and she just couldn’t go on. More…
“I felt that Samurai was a very generous book in various ways, there were all these quotations. And with Lightning Rods, I wasn’t consciously trying to be ungenerous, but I had this sense from the beginning that it would be a very self-contained book, that it would not give anything away. It would be like The Producers. It would be funny.” More…
Carla Blumenkranz discusses her piece “Captain Midnight.” This unusual portrait follows a young Gordon Lish in the early ’60s as he searches for new talent and struggles to start his career. Siddhartha Deb, author of the recently published nonfiction book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, offers insight into the illusion of wealth and class disparities in globalized India. More…
We asked our editors what they’ve been reading lately, and almost all of us have been reading for Occupy Wall Street. We recommend Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind, the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. We also suggest skipping your graduate school qualifying exams and traveling light. More…
The performance started with three actors standing behind the reference desk of the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, alternately reading sentences from the first pages of the novels. Across from them, Rubin projected a column of text from each novel that highlighted lines as they were spoken. The speed of delivery accelerated with each line, until suddenly the projected columns began to spin like a slot machine. More…
In this installment of our monthly podcast, Daniel Smith interviews Jo Ann Beard about her recent novel, In Zanesville. Beard, whose last book was the acclaimed essay collection The Boys of My Youth (1998), talks about the merger of fact and fiction, her attempt to write a young-adult novel, her passion for writing about animals and kids, and being a lifelong “sidekick.” More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 12, featuring an excerpt from Helen DeWitt’s new novel, reporting from the Gathering of the Juggalos, an essay on Stanley Cavell as a philosopher and teacher, an argument against humanitarian intervention, the definitive history of Pitchfork, the beginning of a deep history of recent American fiction, a survey of chat through the ages, and much more. More…
In this discussion with author Sam Lipsyte, podcast hosts Liz Hynes and Daniel Smith chronicle Lipsyte’s journey from his role as the “Lead Screamer” for the punk-rock band Dungbeetle to the publication of his third novel, The Ask. They grapple with the central themes in Lipsyte’s work, including gentrification, belonging, and authenticity. More…
“Žižek nicely termed the argument over the Kosovo intervention a ‘double blackmail.’” “Google+’s stated purpose is to make ‘sharing on the web more like sharing in real life,’ which is true only if ‘in real life’ is understood to mean ‘on the rest of the internet.’” ”Erlewine’s error can be found in the assumption that what people wanted was an encyclopedic survey of music itself.” More…
The second printing of What Was the Hipster? has arrived at the n+1 office, and to celebrate, we’re posting the book’s comprehensive index. From authenticity to bangs to Echo Park to feminism to hip-hop to leggings to media opportunism to Pabst Blue Ribbon to Ray-Bans to self-criticism to tattoos to Whiteness Studies to zombies, the hipster index has it covered. More…
We are proud to announce the launch of the n+1 podcast, a monthly conversation on arts, culture, and literature hosted by Liz Hynes and Daniel Smith, and produced in conjunction with the New School and WNSR: New School Radio. The inaugural episode features editor Mark Greif, associate editor Nikil Saval, and contributor Gemma Sieff. More…
Before the “general audience” ascended to power, aristocratic benefactors ruled the art world. For centuries, authors subsisted outside the open market. Their readers were their patrons; the audience, in theory, an audience of one, plus the hangers-on. Patronage relationships spilled into erotic ones. Eleanor of Aquitaine was surely a lover of the arts, but a Troubadour could serve multiple purposes. More…
The phone is on the table next to me, but it holds no allure. I wouldn’t dream of picking it up. I remember years ago—so many it seems almost quaint—when the phone was a problem. It would ring. Friends would call. To protect my time, I programmed my answering machine to pick up on the first ring. Voices—often my mother’s—would broadcast through the room. More…
For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 11, including (very) short excerpts from “The Information Essay,” reports from Egypt and Wisconsin, new fiction by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and essays on a brother in Afghanistan, obscure English poetry in Cambridge, crisis in the humanities, and Yelp. There’s more where that came from; subscribe today! More…
Sassy was riot grrrl without the total opposition to self-adornment and mass media. Its editors would admit to possibly delusional moments in which they swore Matt Dillon was giving them the eye at CBGB. Every teen magazine of that era swooned over Matt Dillon; only Sassy assumed that you, a teenage girl, knew what CBGB was. More…
I suspect the chief reason we’ve taken to Bernhard in a way that surprises German-speakers is that we have long been accustomed to the great pleasures of what the English writer Geoff Dyer has called “the literature of neurasthenia, of anxiety, fretting, complaint.” New Yorkers are likely to identify this as the tradition that runs from Groucho Marx through Woody Allen, but Dyer sees it as equally English. More…
Even as something about this feels true to your pessimistic soul—you can’t help but feel that we are not all slaves to technological progress. There are still backward parts of the world, like the theater companies of London, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires where human beings still commit vast amounts of words to memory. You have friends who, when they get drunk, recite Keats, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 10, including (very) short excerpts from an analysis of MFA and NYC literary cultures, an essay connecting the pro-life and animal rights movements as “the two cultures of life,” a report on an Indian millionaire and his money, excellent, possibly X-rated fiction from Sheila Heti, and four responses to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. There’s more where that came from; subscribe today! More…
New York readers, please join us tonight, at 7 PM at the Kitchen, for “Roland Barthes: Reflection on the public, private intellectual.” On the posthumous publication of Barthes’s Mourning Diary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, poet and translator Richard Howard and n+1 editor Marco Roth will discuss Howard’s experience working with and translating Barthes as well as broader questions about public versus private intellectual work.
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In 2007, I went to Peter Stein’s stultifying ten-hour production of Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy in Berlin. The one redeeming element was that I got to sit next to Robert Wilson and his identically dressed but much shorter assistant for eight of the ten hours (they arrived two hours late). Wilson slept most of the time but jolted awake at the second intermission. Unfolding his limbs, he said: “This is awful. Let’s burn down the theater.” More…
A history of cultural pessimism should counsel us to be cautious about our dismay. Take Q. D. Leavis, author of the stern 1932 jeremiad Fiction and the Reading Public, which bemoans over two-hundred years of declining cognitive abilities and standards. Mass literacy, newspapers, and popular fiction were all for Leavis signs of the slow death of attentive reading. More…
Before venturing any trendspotting comments about American literature of the past decade, it’s probably worth scanning the ground hovering behind any exciting new figures stamped on the air—in other words, to observe again that novel-writing as an artistic practice has changed more slowly than almost any other. More…
When the time came for International Pynchon Week, held this spring in Lublin, Poland was a country in mourning. There had been a plane crash in which the Polish president, his wife, a dozen members of parliament and members of the clergy had died. The church altars were draped in black. Portraits of the dead hung on the walls. A funereal hush was on the countryside as well. During my two hours on the train from Warsaw I saw horses, several angry geese, and a dignified-looking goat, but only one person, a young man with bottles of beer on the roof of a barn. More…
“The best issue of n+1 in a while” (Paul Constant, “You Should Read the New Issue of n+1,” The Stranger); “the most interesting small magazine to appear in at least a decade” (Steven Johnson); “Emily Witt’s piece is amazing” (Thomas Beller). See what the titans of the internet are talking about. More…
More than half a century ago, Randall Jarrell was invited to speak at an academic panel on “The Obscurity of The Modern Poet.” The problem the panel’s title obviously implied was that “the Modern Poet” had adopted a strategy of willful difficulty, shunning the common reader. Jarrell began his talk with a cheeky misreading. More…
Listening to NPR I tried to decide what to make of Elizabeth Alexander. She seems to me a master of the American poetic singsong. By this I mean the elocutionary convention of delivering verse with preciousness and with rapture, so that the audience can hear how profoundly the poet loves the English language, how badly the poet wants to give the English language a deep tongue-kiss. More…
I tried to justify the contest and my participation in it. After all, I thought, the public voting at the end might encourage reading in a fun way. Though the contest may not encourage high literary culture, how can anyone be so snobbish as to argue that people shouldn’t be the arbiters of their own tastes? But I still felt queasy about participating. More…
The danger with ill-thinking is that it can devolve into the diet of the intellectual in his parlor, looking out over a chaotic landscape that he need not touch with anything but the wheels of his big American car. When it lands shrink-wrapped on coffee tables, El Malpensante provides a singular comfort to the educated, successful Colombian: despite the mess, despite the ignominy, Colombia is a cultured country. More…
At last, having compressed five hundred years or more into thirty minutes or less, Fuentes asked, “What will be the future of Latin American literature?” I opened my notebook and uncapped my pen, thinking that the lecture would only now begin in earnest; but to my surprise, it was already ending. “In the future,” Fuentes declared, “we must be inclusive, not exclusive.” That was that. More…
The challenge for Salman Rushdie nowadays is finding a fitting subject for his self-consciously lush style. To avoid giving the sense that he is a queen dressed as an emperor, Rushdie should write about emperors and queens from faraway longago, as he does in this excerpt from his newest novel. More…
No one ever said Nick Denton was an altruist. But it’s important to note that Gawker Media was designed to compete with the corporations that Gawker abused from the sidelines, because this is what created the dissonance of the site’s later years. From the beginning, it was crucial that Denton hire novice writers for Gawker, not to mention the rest of his titles. More…
“If you aren’t bringing me your new successful novel then there’s little or no point in coming to see me at all. The sight of a novelist who, instead of actually delivering his new capacious novel, only ever promises to deliver it, pains me, and for this reason I would ask you to put off visiting my office until you are in a position to lay your new and good novel on my desk.” More…
First of all, I am so grateful to be blogging on this blog. I mean, look at my predecessor. This is a guy who two weeks ago was living under the desk at the n+1 office, who’d never read a book his entire life, he had problems in the head, he had no girlfriend—and he started a lit-blog. Now he’s taking over the New York Times Book Review. More…
Today’s short stories all seem to bear an invisible check mark, the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory; the very sentences are animated by some kind of vegetable consciousness: “I worked for Kristin,” they seem to say, or “Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious.” Meanwhile, the ghosts of deleted paragraphs rattle their chains from the margins. More…
Director of our research branch, Mark Greif, has sent me on a French fishing expedition. Here are some results, though for the moment just the Paris branch of them (no colonies). I’ll also try to call Houellebecq this week, for those translation rights, if we have the right number. More…
What to do—you can’t play here with my nerves, my angel. I played for ten hours, and ended up losing. Over the course of the day things were very bad at times, and at other times I was up, and then my luck changed. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet. For now, I’ll give it one more shot today, with what remains (very little, a drop). More…
So, you know, here it is on the counter. Which, frankly, it’s there because I just haven’t found another place to put it. But it’s here. And I’ll keep it another week. And if someone comes in, to be honest, I’ll sell it for whatever price they offer me. And then you can come by, we can use that money, we can buy a Coca-Cola. More…
Outside of New Jersey, the loudest (until now) political firestorm of the James McGreevey administration came from an unexpected source. The Governor wound up getting publicly scourged not, as he had before and would again, for being a water-carrier for wealthy men, but for lending the state’s endorsement to an irresponsible poet. More…
