September 24, 2026 At Work John Berger, Death’s Secretary: A Conversation with Tom Overton By Scott Schomburg John Berger in 2014. Photograph by Amarjit Chandan, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. The British writer and artist John Berger is best known for two things: his 1972 book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing, a canonical work of criticism that challenged traditional views of art history; and his acceptance speech that year, after winning the Booker McConnell Prize for his novel G., during which he announced that—in opposition to the prize’s founders, an organization with ties to the slave trade—half his award money would go to the British Black Panthers. That speech is partly why Berger became famous enough for his papers to go to the British Library, where the writer Tom Overton got a job cataloguing them. It is also why, as Overton writes in a new biography, John Berger: From Life, he spent fifteen years of his life piecing Berger’s together. Read More
September 22, 2026 At Work Plan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism By Krithika Varagur Benjamin Moser in 2015, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Benjamin Moser is no stranger to life-writing, having written both the definitive English-language biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag. In his latest book, he takes on not one but twelve biographies in a sprawling attempt to excavate the lesser-known history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the nineteenth century to the present. We might even say thirteen lives, because Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (out September 22 from Doubleday) is a deeply personal project for Moser, and it opens with an extended meditation on his own migration from passive Zionist, as a Jewish child in Houston, to adult anti-Zionist. He conceived of the book shortly after October 7 and researched it at a breakneck pace, including on reporting trips to South Africa, Germany, and Egypt. We became friends when he was putting the finishing touches on it last year at the New York Public Library, where we were both fellows. The book is an emotional and propulsive attempt to trace a lineage for those in the often-lonely position in which he found himself as an adult. But it’s hardly just for Jewish readers; the book’s diverse, impressionistic portraits of individuals from a nineteenth-century rabbi to the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin suggest, cumulatively, that anti-Zionism has been, and will continue to be, a big tent. Moser spoke to me last month about his work, goals, and process from his home in Utrecht. Usually, he jokes, prepublication activities are the “calm before the calm”—but, given the strong opinions elicited by this subject, he predicted that the rollout of this book might be a little more eventful. Read More
September 4, 2026 At Work A Poem Is Full of Meat: Dorothea Lasky on Mother By Luke Dunne Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right). Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on The Shining; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. Memory, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility, one drawn to the uncanny, outré, and polychromatic (emphasis on the latter). Read More
August 14, 2026 At Work In the Studio with Chad Fore, the Writer Behind “Lil Spooky” By Owen Park Photograph by Kathleen McNamara. In the time between his first submission to the Review, in February of last year, and the publication of his short story “Lil Spooky” in our new Summer issue, the writer Chad Fore and I exchanged almost a hundred emails. I also read several of his stories, which tend to be somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that they often take place in one of Fore’s two neighboring hometowns—Piru and Fillmore, in Southern California—and are rich with the kinds of details and characters that feel impossible to invent. “Lil Spooky” follows its high-school-age protagonist, Brad Camacho, through his gradual—then all too fast—initiation into a local gang. In a humiliation ritual disguised as a tryout, he has to freestyle for members of the gang’s hip-hop arm, also known as the Sick Minded Clique, which records posse cuts in a “decrepit old shack” they call the studio, at the end of one of their driveways. Knowing what I did about Fore’s fiction, I wasn’t entirely surprised when, alongside the first draft of this story, he included the link to a song he was featured on when he himself was in high school. He and I talked about the musical influences of his characters and of his own past over lunch this spring, when, after all those messages, we were finally able to meet in person. I found he has an encyclopedic memory for rap verses, some by artists we both love, and others that he’s been writing in his head, he said, for twenty years. INTERVIEWER While we were editing “Lil Spooky,” you told me it was partly inspired by time you spent with your older cousin’s rap group in the nineties and early aughts. What drew you to that specific experience as a subject and how did you approach writing about it after so many years? CHAD FORE From the start I had in mind the type of story I wanted to write. When I think of friends from my hometown or family members who got involved in gangs or drugs or whatever—there were always opportunities before it got bad, where they could still get out of it. But then something happens, and they can’t anymore. I wanted the story to end at that moment where, without having been told anything, the reader would know that Brad’s in a different place, and now it is too late. There was one sentence that I almost cut. I went back and forth. Does this explain too much? Does it not explain enough? INTERVIEWER Which sentence? FORE “It was all pretend until the moment it wasn’t.” At a certain point you’ve fallen through the hole. That was the feeling I was trying to reproduce. 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
June 28, 2026 At Work The Mariah Carey Fan Club: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte By Hazel Byers From Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil. The cover of our new Summer issue features a detail from The End, a painting by the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Da Corte works across film, sculpture, installation, and performance; using costumes and prosthetics, he has assumed the guises of Eminem, Mister Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Pink Panther, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless others. At the beginning of June, I went to Philadelphia to speak with Da Corte in his studio, tucked away in a warehouse behind the gates of a labyrinthine high school campus. In the back room, filled with books, papers, and a number of cartoonish props, we talked about Judy Garland, Mariah Carey, and Carey’s 1999 album Rainbow. When we broke from chatting to have lunch, Da Corte served me an excellent tuna salad. INTERVIEWER Will you tell us about The End? ALEX DA CORTE The End is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey’s Rainbow. INTERVIEWER I was listening to “Heartbreaker” last night. She is so good. Why that album? DA CORTE I probably shouldn’t go on too much about how I love her, but I was part of the Mariah Carey fan club in the late eighties, and I wrote letters to her as early as I could. I remember reading that her father was Venezuelan, and I was like, Oh, my father’s Venezuelan! I was eighteen when I first heard Rainbow, and while my relationship to music, to my own sexuality, has changed since then, I also listened to the album just yesterday. INTERVIEWER What do you mean by “CD painting”? DA CORTE The CD paintings were born out of an interest in the readymade, a term associated with the work of Marcel Duchamp, relating to the idea of the found object. If I think about how I first began listening to music, part of what drove me to buy a CD was the image on the cover of the album. It never changes, but the image gets scratched, the liner notes get wrinkled, a kind of touch is transferred onto the music. The CD paintings are evidence of that transference. To make them, I took the liner notes of all the CDs I had that were beloved to me—Janet Jackson, Madonna, Mariah Carey—and scanned them and had them made into flags at a store across the street from the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. The image that was scanned from the liner notes became a flag printed on cotton, stretched the way one might stretch a canvas. Then I laid a piece of plexiglass over the flag and painted a layer onto the plexiglass that obscured some of the image printed on the flag. Read More