Yevgeniya Traps
By Yevgeniya Traps
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Stupid Darn Bird
What’s “Stupid F—king Bird” about? Oh, so, so many things, including the need for new forms in art and the impossibility of those forms; the unrequitedness of love, romantic and familial alike; the foolishness and vanity of human wishes; the frailty of the flesh and of the spirit. Now, add music. Aaron Posner’s adaptation of…
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Culture Why Michael Chabon’s New Novel Made Me Gasp
Michael Chabon’s new novel, “Moonglow,” initially presents itself as a fairly straightforward memoir. And yet complications abound from the get-go, as one might expect from a writer who has done more than most to complicate what genre works can do and be and how they might be critically received. (An author’s note also suggests that…
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Culture Well, This Certainly Must Be the Best Backgammon Novel Ever Written
A Gambler’s Anatomy By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 304 pages, $27.95 ‘A Gambler’s Anatomy,” Jonathan Lethem’s 10th novel, has a promisingly madcap premise: Alexander Bruno, dashing and suave (“He’d been told he resembled Roger Moore, or the bass player from Duran Duran”), hustles a living as an itinerant backgammon player, relieving overly rich, overly confident “whales”…
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Culture Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Ambitious and Incredibly Long New Novel
Here I Am By Jonathan Safran Foer Farrar, Straus and Giroux $28, 592 pages By Yevgeniya Traps ‘Here I Am,” the title of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, is an allusion to the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son: Called upon by God, Abraham responds “Here I am,” an apparent acquiescence to the…
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Culture Photographer Nan Goldin Dares You To Look
The first moment that really gets me comes when the strains of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” start, Nico’s voice scratching over the already scratched surfaces of the pictures. It’s a little cheesy, maybe, this song about reflecting another’s innermost self laid over a montage of photographed images of people glancing at themselves, but so what?…
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Art Remembering The Transcendent Meditations Of Eva Hesse
Only late in “Eva Hesse,” the new documentary about Eva Hesse’s art and her life, do we actually hear the artist’s voice. Part of an interview she gave to the art historian and writer Cindy Nemser, the audio recording is poignant, even haunting, given that by the time the transcript of the interview appeared as…
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Culture How a Suicidal Dog Led a Writer to a Nobel Prize
Pedigree By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 144 Pages, $25 After the Circus By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 216 pages, $16 Paris Nocturne By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 160 pages, $16 In his recollection of his first 21 years, the Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano writes that, apart from his younger brother, Rudy,…
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Culture Carrie Brownstein Plays the ‘Hunger’ Games
Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $27.95 The title of Carrie Brownstein’s recently released memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” comes, as any Sleater-Kinney fan will giddily tell you, from one of the songs on her band’s album “The Woods” (which was released shortly before the group’s…
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