May 9, 2025 The Review’s Review The Hobo Handbook By Jeremiah David Between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Photograph by Rondal Partridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A “crew change” refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it’s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected. Read More
May 2, 2025 The Review’s Review Keith McNally’s Rearview Mirror By Rosa Shipley From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review. “Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it. In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg, Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C. This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life. Read More
April 25, 2025 The Review’s Review On Fish Tales: A Forgotten Erotic Novel of Raw Longing and Fierce Freedom By Danielle A. Jackson Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan. Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride. The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene: “Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room. “Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.” “Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?” Read More
April 18, 2025 The Review’s Review Time Travel By Cynthia Zarin Old cherry orchard, 1994, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things. Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.” What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go? Read More
April 11, 2025 The Review’s Review Snow White Is Tired By Alec Mapes-Frances Stanley Schtinter as Robert Walser. “I know the story well,” says the Snow White of Robert Walser’s Schneewittchen, “about the apple, the coffin. Be so kind as to tell me more. Why does nothing else come to mind? Must you hang on to these details? Must you forever draw on them?” In Stanley Schtinter’s 2024 adaptation of Walser’s 1901 dramolette, characters from the Grimm fairy tale exhaust themselves and their images in a recounting of the story in which they are inscribed. The film is a complete performance of the English translation of Walser’s text, which picks up where the Grimm tale leaves off. The queen, who has tried to kill Snow White twice, wants her daughter to forget everything. Under her orders, the hunter, her lover and Snow White’s would-be assassin, reenacts the attempt on Snow White’s life. There is discussion of the desire for death, springtime, fresh garden air, kisses, snow, and sleep. The characters chastise each other for telling fairy tales, rehearsing scripts, making use of “gesture and technique.” Read More
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