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Staff Picks: H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Apocalyptic Dry-humping

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This Week’s Reading

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A still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.

The hysteria and mystery surrounding the Germanwings crash have led me back to Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a 1997 film collage that traces the history of plane hijackings—and, just as important, the media fixation on those hijackings. When Tom McCarthy presented Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y at Film Society of Lincoln Center last month, he praised its presentation of “media as a crypt from which history is leaking out” and “terrorism as a theological condition.” The film’s macabre footage captivates, in no small part because of Grimonprez’s shrewd, ironical editing. In one sequence, a grinning boy just rescued from a hijacked plane tells reporters, “I had a good time, I guess”; in another, a girl, still violently crying, is hustled off a recuperated aircraft only to be led into the klieg lights of a press junket. As McCarthy pointed out, the project hasn’t aged well—it came before 9/11, after all, and its focus on television can feel quaint in the age of the smartphone—but as a meditation on the codependency of media and terrorism, it remains invaluable. Sprinkled throughout the film are spoken excerpts from DeLillo’s Mao II, which feel, whenever they’re incanted, truer than ever: “In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act.” —Dan Piepenbring

Someone who has “a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic” might turn out to be pedantic and self-absorbed, but chances are, they’re the sort of person you want to know deeply but are never able to. The person in question here is Joseph Mitchell, the rather enigmatic subject of a new biography that is itself the subject of a review by Janet Malcolm in the latest New York Review of Books. (See also our series “Big, Bent Ears,” which takes Mitchell as a subject.) Malcolm is an obvious choice for the assignment, but that doesn’t detract from how fun it is to read her on Mitchell. “Where the hell is this going?” she asks about a rambling conversation between Mitchell and one of his subjects. “As in all of Mitchell’s pieces everything is always going somewhere, though not necessarily so you’d notice.” Malcolm is admiring of Mitchell’s work, reverential even, but astute. When Thomas Kunkel, Mitchell’s biographer, discovers that his subject invented portions of his nonfiction stories and makes excuses for these fabrications, Malcolm puts him in his place: “Few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell.” —Nicole Rudick

In one story from Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Islandthe locals of a small town get drunk, dance, and dry-hump in a hotel bar while the waters of an apocalyptic flood rise outside. This sets the tone for the entire collection: a party at the end of the world. Barry has a savage eye and a tender streak, and these thirteen stories showcase Irish wit at its most ferocious and unapologetic. He writes with squeamish honesty: in one, a middle-age father admits that “horribly often, our beautiful, perfect daughters emerge into a perfect facsimile of how our beautiful, desirable wives had been, back then, when they were young,” and in another, a pensioner decides the baby she’s just kidnapped “isn’t worth the effort or the risk,” and so abandons it in a hawthorn bush. Barry’s characters span a range of ages and backgrounds, but they share a penchant for misery and a talent for destruction. In the final story, an infatuated young artist thinks wistfully of his lost love, hoping she’s still out there in the world, still “beautiful, foul-mouthed, and inviolate.” I hope Barry’s writing continues that way, too. —Kit Connolly

The stories in Rachel Kushner’s The Strange Case of Rachel K are all set in Cuba—as was her debut novel, Telex from Cuba—but each has its own ecology. Kushner’s sentences should be sent into space as evidence that some humans do indeed understand reason and consequence, and this accessible collection could convert newcomers to her cause. In the opening scene of the title story, the narrator asks, “What could you accurately claim to know about anyone, much less a stranger to whom you were attracted? And yet you could claim, accurately, that a person was evasive, and that their evasions interested you.” Kushner’s prose is precise rather than evasive, but there’s still a compelling mystery in these stories, one that invites the reader to come closer. —Catherine Carberry