Category: Literature
I Love Dick is great as a TV show, but you still can’t beat the book
Jill Soloways adaptation of Chris Krauss novel is funny and beautiful in its own way. But it can’t transmit the intense pleasure of the ideas in the original. Chris Kraus had been describing her 1997 novel I Love Dick as funny for years by the time the news broke, in February, that Transparent creator Jill […]
Greg Tate: the flyboy goes back to the future
From Michael Jacksons nose to the righteousness of Jan-Michel Basquiat, Tate has been analysing culture for over 30 mind-expanding years. He talks philosophy, Afrofuturism, and how black artists defy boundaries. In his 1987 Village Voice essay I’m White! What’s Wrong with Michael Jackson, Greg Tate wrote there was proof that God dont like ugly since […]
Scream by Tama Janowitz review memoirs of the reluctantly famous
Her debut novel put her in the Brat Pack of the 80s with Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Then she faded from view, a process she tracks in her new memoir Tama Janowitzs youth reminds her of the movie Forrest Gump: a series of unlikely brushes with history. At 19, during a year abroad […]
Todd Solondz: There may be a line I shouldnt cross I dont know where it is
The writer-director has mined the darkest of subjects from stalking to rape to paedophilia. In Wiener-Dog he turns his attention to dachshunds and death In an unlikely turret right at the top of a cinema in Piccadilly, the film director Todd Solondz and I, practically knee to knee, are discussing dog ownership. Does he have […]
‘The history of a city is the history of its cafs’: writing life in Mexico
Finding the old coffeehouses among the American chains in Mexico City is hard, says author and journalist Juan Villoros, but they’re wonderful spaces to write in when you find one. Built over a lake that was drained, overwhelmed by the exhaust of cars and the pollution in a valley encircled by mountains that don’t let […]