April 11, 2025 The Review’s Review Anne Imhof’s Talent Show By Liby Hays Sihana Shalaj and Eliza Douglas in DOOM. Photograph by Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory. Anne Imhof’s DOOM: House of Hope, a three-hour, influencer-studded “blockbuster” performance of Romeo and Juliet, presents a variation on the talent show more akin to a talent situation. Imhof invents a world in which artistic talent might emanate at any moment, unprompted, from the ranks of a psychically bonded skater mob. Staged around a cavalcade of Cadillac Escalades parked at random diagonals across the Park Avenue Armory’s fifty-five-thousand-square-foot hangar, the show began with a wolf’s howl ringing out from the darkness. The Jumbotron suspended overhead started counting down from 3:00:00, instilling a Hunger Games–esque sense of urgency while a crew of youths, their clothes emblazoned with DOOM in varsity lettering, trickled in to mount the industrial-beam platforms attached to the Escalades. Projecting defiance or disaffection, the actors stared down at us, pantomiming tears trailing down their cheeks. Finally, the metal gate around the periphery was lowered, and we were free to infiltrate the scene. Cool kids continually forked off from the clique to launch into choreographed performances, recitations of found texts, or miscellaneous scenes from Shakespeare’s play. Their blocking traversed the Escalades, multiple conventional stages, a semi-secluded white room, and the spotlit center court. The audience was left to roam the hangar but generally gravitated toward the moving center of interest. More intimate moments, like monologues or the dripping of candle wax on naked skin, were filmed on a phone and broadcast in real time on the Jumbotron. Meanwhile, background players kept on gesticulating from the car stages, covertly making out or tattooing one another in the trunks. Read More
April 11, 2025 The Review’s Review A Very Precious Bonjour Tristesse By Mina Tavakoli Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment. Françoise Sagan, who crashed and flipped her fabulous Aston Martin DB2/4 at high speed en route to Saint-Tropez, did not die despite getting her skull crushed beneath her British-made hatchback in Fiesta Red. She did not drown in a yachting accident on the Riviera some four years earlier, nor did she immediately go bankrupt after becoming so consumed by roulette that she personally asked the French Ministry of the Interior to ban her from domestic casinos. Her mutant capacity for indulgence, combined with her other cosmopolitan hobbies (whiskey, morphine, tax evasion), made her so much the poster girl for sixties Gallic glamour that a French newspaper once gave her the topline “un charmant petit monstre”—though a death drive that well oiled could have used something more like what Susan Sontag said about the self-destructive: “Dying is overwork.” Read More
April 10, 2025 Re-Reading Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage By Rachel Kushner Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Clay is gripping the wheel for no reason. He fingers a Valium then puts it back in the bottle. Goes to the movies and stares at the green exit signs instead of the screen. Looks for his friend Julian in almost every scene of the book but when he finds him and their eyes lock nothing happens, Julian drifts off. Listening to his friends talk, Clay wonders if he’s slept with the person being discussed. Waiting for someone at a Du-par’s diner in Studio City, he wonders if the gift-wrapped boxes in the Christmas display on the counter are empty. Many of the people his friends talk about are indistinguishable to Clay. His own two younger sisters are indistinguishable to him, mere symptoms of the decline of Western Civilization, baby vipers who ask their mom to turn up “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage” by the band Killer Pussy, who put a pet-store fish in the jacuzzi to watch it die, who assure Clay they can get their own cocaine, and get mad when he won’t stop to look at the burning wreckage of a car accident near a McDonald’s in Palm Springs in the middle of the night. The McDonald’s, anyhow, is closed due to a power outage from wind. Read More
April 9, 2025 First Person The End of Roadside Attractions By Jane Stern The UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, North Carolina, which was destroyed by a fire. Photograph courtesy of Jane Stern. I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly married and fresh out of college) crisscrossed America, hunting for small-town cafés, diners, and BBQs, compiling a book that would be called Roadfood. Back then, to review these unheralded mom-and-pop cafés was strange. Foodies (a term that had yet to be popularized) were interested only in eating at gourmet bastions in big cities or abroad. These Continental restaurants were expensive; they served French or northern Italian food and had waiters wielding big pepper mills. It did not take us long to realize we liked eating and traveling more than we liked what we’d studied, so as card-carrying contrarians with a car and a few bucks in our pockets, we decided that simple American food needed a champion. We spent the next three years on the road, scouting out these places. We drove two hundred miles a day and ate (on average) ten meals a day. When we weren’t driving or eating, our attention was drawn to weird things by the side of the road. Read More
April 7, 2025 Writers' Houses Friedrich Schiller’s Secret Beloved By Alexander Wells Photograph courtesy of Alexander Wells. The small eastern German city of Rudolstadt sits on a curve of the river Saale. All through the summer of 1788, the great poet-philosopher-playwright Friedrich Schiller used to stride around this bend, impatient to meet up with the love of his life, his future wife, Charlotte—but also with her sister Caroline. When he couldn’t see them, he sent love letters, often several a day, and these were sometimes addressed not to one sister but both. They would gather on a bridge across the river. They would swim and sing and talk and read. When the girls’ parents were away, they spent time together in their family home. What happened inside is now unknowable. “You have already become so much to my heart,” Schiller wrote, that formal you being potentially either singular or plural. Three years later, when Schiller and Charlotte were married and living together in the nearby town of Jena, a young poet named Karl Gotthard Graß became a regular visitor at their house. He once wrote Schiller a letter in which he marveled at the lack of jealousy and quarreling between the two women of the household. “I cannot hide my feelings about the love of these two splendid sisters, for each other and for you,” he wrote. “It was often as if [their mother] had only one daughter and you … had two wives.” It was, the painter continued, just like a fairy tale. Read More
April 3, 2025 Bookmarks What Stirs the Life in You? The Garden Asks By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Water by the Persian mystic Rumi (1207–1273), translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori (New York Review Books): The Garden’s scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in. Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in you? The garden asks. The garden thrives. Invites us to do the same. Saplings break through darkness— ladders set against the sky. Mysteries ascend. Read More