July 9, 2026 On Books César Aira’s Art of Not Editing By Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer Photograph by Nina Subin. César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him: The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with … In my house there is always something more important to do than write. They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life. And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers. Read More
July 8, 2026 On Painting Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism By Jackson Arn Francisco de Zurbarán, Hercules and Cerberus, 1634, oil on canvas, 132 cm x 151 cm. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado. The TikTok in question, posted by Donald Trump last summer, shows Barack Obama being wrestled to the floor, handcuffed, and held in a jail cell. The camera moves, or “moves,” too smoothly, and everything has a melted-plastic glow that screams AI-generated, at least for the time being. The first few bars of “Y.M.C.A.” are playing. So, yes: when the New York Times published an article about videos like this and deemed them clearly fake, it was stating what anybody with functioning eyeballs already knew. Then again, if the comment section is any guide, there appear to be sentient American adults who think the forty-fourth president is currently in prison. Lately I’ve wondered why people believe things, or if they really do. Often it appears they can’t remember whether they do or not. Nobody seems to know why this is the case, except that the internet is involved somehow, or MAGA, or wokeness, or AI. I had been thinking about the usual explanations, and getting tired of them, the same week I went to the National Gallery in London to look at the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán. This turned out to be less of a digression than I’m making it sound. Read More
July 6, 2026 On Books Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp By Kathryn Scanlan The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; what burned in her were questions, and the book’s resulting form could be called an interrogation. Can we say she departed from the facts in the service of fiction, or should we say instead that fiction enabled a looser and truer vision of the crime? She published the book in 1955 as Vingt minutes de silence (newly translated as Twenty Minutes of Silence) with Éditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It’s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette’s novels, which resolutely ignore norms of grammar, typography, plot, character, and narrative, and look something like long, erratic dialogue-poems. In the introduction to the English version of his Exercises in Style, Queneau’s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder’s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950): “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem it in, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.” Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and “the first statement of this new language should be … to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.” Twenty Minutes of Silence, though a novel, can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment, of social and familial mores, and of the genre of the novel itself. Read More
July 3, 2026 Dispatch Two Hundred and Fifty By Stephanie Wambugu Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu. Once we had ventured far enough into America to no longer be anywhere near the mood-lit wine bars and overrun coffee shops of North Brooklyn, where I live, secession began to strike me as not only possible but inevitable, as if it were only a matter of time before we all realize this Union is a house too tenuous, inharmonious, and ill-defined to remain standing, and act accordingly. From state to state, there is such variation in accents, languages spoken, climate, culinary traditions, and racial demographics, and such a complete lack of consensus when it comes to guns, drugs, and abortion, that it is hard to say what we all have in common, apart from the interstate highway system and reliance on certain corporations. Yet in Nashville, Tennessee, while eating a plate of roasted lamb in an Halal Uzbek restaurant whose interior looked so residential it was as if we had trespassed into the suburban sitting room of a Central Asian family and been allowed to stay, I was swept up for the duration of the meal in the romance of American multiculturalism, which made me think of the sweet but nationalistic songs I was made to sing in school during the cloyingly optimistic Obama-era years of my childhood. Especially on my mind was the sanitized version of “This Land Is Your Land.” We always skipped the final verses of the folk standard to omit Woody Guthrie’s explicit mentions of Depression-era hunger and his ideas about private property. I felt the song’s aspirational brotherly love most while buying a pack of cigarettes that were so inexpensive I thought the single-digit prices on display behind the gas station counter must be a mistake. There, smoking was still affordable and I was an Everywoman participating in a cheap, eternal national pastime. Read More
July 1, 2026 On Photography Saint Peter: Hujar’s Contact Sheets at the Morgan By Nicholas Gamso Contact sheet: Peter Hujar self portraits on heel, 1974, gelatin silver print, 8.5 x 11″, 2013.108:8.2110. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013. Only a decade ago, just mentioning the photographer Peter Hujar required explanation. “He took that famous picture of Susan Sontag, recumbent with tired eyes.” Or: “He made gorgeous black-and-white photos of writers, artists, dancers, beautiful men, empty landscapes, and animals.” But today no preamble is necessary. There are countless entry points to Hujar’s extensive oeuvre, many of which appeared in the past year alone: a half-dozen new books; exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco; and most prominently, a biopic, Peter Hujar’s Day, adapted by Ira Sachs from a 1974 interview with Linda Rosenkrantz. Read More
June 30, 2026 At Work Rachel Aviv’s Act of Revision: On You Won’t Get Free of It By Stephanie DeGooyer At a glance, Rachel Aviv’s new book looks like a conventional kind of essay collection: six pieces drawn from more than a decade of writing for The New Yorker, framed by a new preface. You Won’t Get Free of It gathers some of Aviv’s most celebrated portraits, including those of Hannah Upp, who disappeared three times in nine years during episodes of dissociative fugue, and Andrea Robin Skinner, whose childhood abuse was suppressed within her family even as her mother—the writer Alice Munro—refracted it through fiction. But You Won’t Get Free of It is not just a greatest-hits compilation. Subtitled Stories of Mothers and Daughters, it is also an act of revision. As Aviv notes in the preface, she reported many of the older stories in the book while “feeling, existentially, like a daughter.” Years later, after having children, she returned to these pieces—newly aware, she writes, of “the drama on the mother’s side, too.” She revisited her notes to find details she might not have fully grasped as a younger reporter and reinterviewed subjects about facts whose significance she’d missed the first time. Read More