Celebrating Community
We are children for only a short time, but spend the rest of our lives making sense of our childhoods. It’s an impressionable period of so many firsts. We soak them up like a sponge. In his heartfelt coming-of-age memoir One Headlight, Matt Caprioli (a former arts editor of this paper) wrings out his origin story as a gay man […]
Review of Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter by Kate Walter Review by Michael Quinn The start of the pandemic was like a game of musical chairs. The music suddenly stopped. We all scrambled for safety. We worried for (or laughed at) the ones without a spot (the pandemic also revealed the mean-spirited among us). But we all […]
Although the popularity of Airbnb has skyrocketed in recent years, many people still enjoy staying in hotels. One of the reasons is having someone to clean up after you. But what if that person had another reason for being there? For three weeks in 1981, Sophie Calle worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. While cleaning 12 rooms on […]
Review of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World by Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis Review by Michael Quinn My partner is a Christian. He’s been seeking a spiritual home. Prior to the pandemic, he spent many Sundays trying out different churches throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Some, he felt, had a drowsy, […]
Review of Mona by Pola Oloixarac, Translated from the Spanish by Adam Morris Review by Michael Quinn Waking up on a Palo Alto train station platform, covered in blood, with no memory of what happened or how she got there, Mona, the title character of the third novel by Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac (translated from the Spanish by Adam Morris), […]
Review of Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time by Vivian Gornick Review by Michael Quinn Bronx-born Vivian Gornick cut her teeth as a journalist working as a reporter for Village Voice in the early ’70s. An urgent need to “put the reader behind my eyes—see the scene as I had seen it, feel […]
For months now, New Yorkers have been bent out of shape, either cooped up at home or stretched thin on the front line of what’s happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s strange to think of the world we all inhabited a few months ago, the casual freedoms we enjoyed: seeing friends, going out to eat. In his ambitious illustrated history […]
There isn’t a human life on earth that hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time in human history, there’s no other place to which we can escape. Here in New York City, many of us are quarantined at home. The nesting instinct isn’t natural this time of year when, through our dirty winter windows, we can […]
Review of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019 by Natasha Stagg In another era, the worst thing you could be accused of was selling out. But for a younger generation, it’s become the objective: the new version of the American dream. No matter how old you are, the corporatization of our culture makes it common to talk about things […]
The late novelist and short story writer Stephen Dixon will be honored by authors and an actor at “Celebrating Stephen Dixon,” a literary event hosted by Murmrr in the Union Temple of Brooklyn, near Grand Army Plaza, on Thursday, February 27,, 2020 at 7:30 PM. Dixon, a Manhattan native, died this past November at the age of 83. Describing himself […]