May 28, 2026 On Things Ode to the Kitchen Bath By Daniel Felsenthal Bill Costa, The Bath (Homage to Paul Cadmus), 1985. Courtesy of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2001.1134.0008). Bequest of Douglass Roby. Our bathtub was born in a sturdier, more brutal age. It’s a deep and oblong cauldron—perfect for cooking a human being—which stands in the center of our kitchen. Perched between the cheapo stove and the sink, the tub’s claw-feet are plantar flexed, as if they’re wearing high heels or pointe shoes, topped with swollen ankles and muscled calves. Time and use have abraded the inner porcelain. Only Bar Keeper’s Friend, a powder from the nineteenth century packaged in a retro canister (the plastic squeeze bottle just won’t cut it), keeps grime at bay. Read More
May 27, 2026 Conversations The Twenty-Year Novel: Harriet Clark on The Hill By Lidija Haas A gifted fiction writer who doesn’t publish must stand accused of genius or maladjustment (if we can distinguish those)—and Harriet Clark endured both during the twenty-plus years she spent refining her debut, The Hill. The work in progress, from which the Review eventually extracted a Plimpton Prize–winning short story in 2022, earned her several MacDowell residencies, fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program, and a rare pitch of whispered literary envy and suspicion—amply justified, in the end, by the novel itself, which came out earlier this month. Clark described its slow, uncertain gestation over tea one Friday afternoon in May, in the sun-soaked attic study of the Bed-Stuy house she shares with her wife and son. Its striking premise draws on her early experience. During her infancy, her mother, Judith, a member of the Weather Underground and other radical organizations, was arrested, and later sentenced to life in prison for driving the getaway vehicle for an armed robbery, intended to fund revolutionary struggle, that went disastrously awry. (She was released on parole after nearly forty years in 2019.) Like her protagonist, Suzanna, Clark (whose father also spent years incarcerated in connection with his involvement in militant groups) was raised by her maternal grandparents, once prominent Communists; they apparently fostered and protected Clark’s intimacy with her mother against the best efforts of the state. Yet rather than some thinly veiled autobiography, the book is an eerie, dreamlike, funny, psychologically acute fable crossed with a nineteenth-century novel (unexpressed ardor, letters burned unread, train rides, consequences), a portrait of childhood to rival What Maisie Knew. Read More
May 22, 2026 On Books Barthelme, the Houstonian By Susan Choi Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain. Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself. Read More
May 21, 2026 On Poetry Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota By Thomas John Weber Pine Island, 2026. Photograph by Thomas John Weber. Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a spine, with little to see on either side except corn and billboards—unless it’s winter, in which case it’s just billboards. Most advertise burgers or death: McDonald’s (seven miles north), Newt’s Burgers (thirteen miles south), judgment day (“After You Die, You Will Meet God”), plus two competing southeast Minnesota cremation services. Only one billboard, on the south end, is locally relevant. It’s newer, smaller, and appears to be homemade. It reads: NO DATA CENTER. Read More
May 20, 2026 Unfinished Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Perte Loss” By Katie Kirkland From Perte Loss, 1979. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. In 1979, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha submitted a proposal for a two-channel video performance titled Perte Loss to the San Francisco–based collective Video Free America. The performance, she explained, would explore multiple valences of the French word perte: “loss, articulated as memory, time, image, etc within the duration of the piece.” One channel, representing the present, would consist of moving images and words in the present tense. The other would represent the “memory for / of channel #1” and would consist of still images and words in the past tense. The artist herself would mediate between the two channels, appearing behind glass as “a video image” and incorporating performance, still and moving image, and both live and recorded sound to evoke the process of “giv[ing] life to what is fixe, mort, by remembering.” Two months before she was scheduled to perform the piece at Video Free America as part of a group show of “Video Performance Art,” Cha formally withdrew from the exhibition due to a lack of both financial and philosophical support. “I have no desire or need to make compromises on the conceived project, for it to completely transform itself into no longer the same piece,” she explained. She would not live to realize the piece in its originally intended form. The brutal fact of Cha’s rape and murder in New York in 1982 is an irreducible part of the encounter with her work, yet it is not the only way Cha’s archive prompts us to reckon with incompletion. Cha experimented with an aesthetics of fragmentation and ellipsis; ideas and forms recur and evolve across projects, inviting us to undo the commonplace divisions between unfinished and finished works and to instead see them as part of one continuous creative practice. Read More
May 19, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: Sackcloth 1953 By Hal Foster Alberto Burri, Sackcloth 1953, 1953, burlap and thread on canvas, 33 ⅞ x 39 ⅜ inches. Photograph by Hal Foster. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here, and the previous installments here, here, and here. Can a painting still be called a painting if it is made of rough burlap riven with holes and tears? Although most of the gashes in Sackcloth 1953 are patched, stitched, or sewn, some still gape, exposing the canvas underneath, which is painted black and brown. Held together by this support alone, the burlap is also stained and bleached, with blotches that range from light brown and red to pale orange and yellow. Why salvage and repair this nasty piece of fabric at all, unless salvage and repair are somehow the subjects? At the same time, gaps go unsewn, sutures fray, and patches don’t match, all of which suggests the futility of reparation, at least any that purports to be complete. Alberto Burri worked on the painting horizontally, sewing it on a table, before rotating it vertically for us to view on a wall. But the initial orientation is registered in the final one. As we look at the painting, we seem to gaze down on a scoured terrain; patches, holes, and stitches also suggest physical features—a hill, a ravine, a field, a stream, a lake. Landscape is a very common subject in painting, of course, and the dimensions of Sackcloth 1953 suit the genre. Here, though, landscape has become an abstract topography that is tactile as well as visual. Read More