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Readability, Schmeadability, and Other News
James Aumonier, Where the Water Lilies Grow, 1870. I’m a man of simple tastes: I take my food edible, my water potable, my words legible. But people can be awfully choosy. Ben Roth has inveighed...
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Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y
Mary McCarthy “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording...
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Staff Picks: Constipation, Hubris, Sincerity
Arista Alanis, “ … on down the road” (detail), oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″. From the cover of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I first encountered Arthur Schnitzler’s work as an undergraduate, when I...
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John Gardner’s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy
From the cover of John Gardner’s Grendel. I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. —John Gardner, when asked what...
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I Read Playboy for the Comix
Art Spiegelman for Playboy, ca. 1981 In the late seventies and early eighties, I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies, an ongoing section in Playboy that tried to recuperate underground comix:...
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What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd...
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What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William...
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Arthur Cravan, the Original Troll
Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet-boxer, was neither a good poet nor a good boxer, but he was a legendary provocateur. Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by...
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Tom Wolfe, 1930–2018
Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters...
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You, Too, Can Live in Norman Mailer’s House
Images courtesy of Core NYC. Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights pad is on the market! The fourth-floor two-bedroom apartment overlooking the promenade was first listed in 2011, but the sale fell...
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