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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Come Together

3 weeks ago | bookforum.com | Sarah Schulman

WHEN SARAH SCHULMAN WALKED INTO MY APARTMENT, a month or so after Artforum magazine fired me in October 2023 for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation, her first words were, “How can I help?” I think this is the most ethical sentence in the English language. She said it like she meant it. This orientation toward the world permeates her latest work,The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (Thesis, $30).
Passion Project

3 weeks ago | bookforum.com | Shon Faye

TO DATE, I HAVE SEEN EVERY SEASON of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, a dating series in which attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people spend ten days speaking to other attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people through a wall, in the hopes that their inability to see each other will allow them to develop “real” feelings.
The Interpretation of Screams

3 weeks ago | bookforum.com | Maggie Nelson

“IT DOESN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE that no one wants to read this pathemata,” writes Maggie Nelson in her new book, Pathemata. Nelson is not speaking of the book itself, but rather about a document that provides much of its source material: a record she has made of her jaw pain, for the benefit of doctors––its genesis, medical imaging, and history of unsuccessful treatment.
Dance Dance Revolution

Feb 12, 2025 | 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

Feb 12, 2025 | 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

Feb 12, 2025 | 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.