Bookforum

Bookforum is a quarterly book review published five times a year. It explores a range of topics in both fiction and nonfiction, as well as arts and culture. Featuring essays, interviews, columns, and reviews, Bookforum provides insights into the ideas that influence contemporary intellectual discourse.

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Dance Dance Revolution

2 months ago | bookforum.com | Emily Witt

ARIANA REINES: Last time we spoke, it was over the summer, before Health and Safety (Pantheon, $27) came out. It was compulsive reading for me—at least five books in one. I don’t know how you did it.
May Days

2 months ago | bookforum.com | Carrie Courogen

ELAINE MAY DIDN’T SET OUT to become a director. What she really wanted to do was write. Her first film, A New Leaf, came about partly because it was 1968 and Paramount knew it would look good to hire a woman director. And partly because May wouldn’t sell her script without being guaranteed director approval—the only way to ensure her work didn’t get turned into something else entirely.
Nowhere Fast

2 months ago | bookforum.com | Antonio G. Di Benedetto

THE NARRATORS of Antonio di Benedetto’s “Trilogy of Expectation” blur further in each successive book, until they are all but effaced. In Zama,published in 1956, the narrator has a name (Don Diego de Zama), a location (the Spanish colony of Paraguay), and several exact dates (we encounter him in 1790, then again in 1794, and finally in 1799).
Heart-Shaped Big Box

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Adelle Waldman

Adelle Waldman discusses her novel about retail workers plotting against their boss Help Wanted BY Adelle Waldman. New York: W. W. Norton. 288 pages. $29. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon SHEILA HETI: Your new novel, Help Wanted (W. W. Norton, $29), is about the collective action of a group of workers at a big-box store. They try to get their hated boss out of their hair in a way that is counterintuitive and comic.
Burning Bush

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | John Ganz

AS WITH JUST ABOUT EVERY deep, wide, and candid account of American life, race all but saturates When the Clock Broke, John Ganz’s trenchant look-back-in-incredulity at American political culture in the early 1990s. Then, as now, race is the elephant in the national living room that many white voters wish they could look away from or ahead of—if they look at all.
The Fame Monsters

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Grace Byron |Philippa Snow

BY Philippa Snow. London: MACK. 104 pages. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon Grace Byron CHARLOTTE TILBURY LAUNCHED ITS KIM K lipstick in 2016: a vibeless, neutral, basic bitch pink. Kim was in on it, of course.
Imitation of Life

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Claire Messud

A novelist reimagines her family of Algerian colonists This Strange Eventful History BY Claire Messud. New York: W. W. Norton. 488 pages. $27. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon IN THE PROLOGUE TO CLAIRE MESSUD’S This Strange Eventful History, the unnamed narrator goes to see a witch, a “clairvoyant,” while on holiday in some seaside New England town: Though I told her I was a writer, she insisted that I was a healer; once she said it, I willed it to be true.
Efface Off

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Rachel Cusk

MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” There, we found Mary and the manger, the Christ child, cuckolded Joseph: images gathered in a “cult of sentimentality and surfaces” to obscure the innate beastliness of human existence and so tidy death.
Libido Re Mi

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Miranda July

IN THE FIRST PAGES of All Fours, Miranda July’s second novel, the unnamed narrator confesses to collecting intimate ephemera from her friends’ relationships. But the “artifacts”—“screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers,” recordings of conversations—never add up to something substantial.
Bizarre Love Triangle

Oct 22, 2024 | bookforum.com | Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru concludes his Tricolore trilogy Blue Ruin BY Hari Kunzru. New York: Knopf. 272 pages. $28. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon IN HARI KUNZRU’S NOVEL My Revolutions (2007), which starts in Britain in 1998, the narrator, a fifty-year-old named Michael Frame, receives a visit from an old friend, Miles, the only person who knows that he is a former violent radical living under an assumed identity.