Carl Phillips. Photo: Reston Allen.

In the poem “Even If Sleep and Death Are Brothers,” Carl Phillips sketches an image: “Of beaten gold—gold beaten / to a thinness like that of paper—a woman’s funeral mask.” It recalls for me John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (in which death is not a “breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat”), a heartbreaking poem about loss and longing. So, too, does Phillips write poetry meant as a balm for wistfulness; in his latest collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, comfort and nostalgia are as closely related as sleep and death. The characters are returning to the places they came from or the places where they had been happy, and stretching briefly backward across time. This happens in small, sensually rich moments, in the titular field or during a swim at a spot from long ago. These are bittersweet poems, lovely homages to the precious penumbral moments when life seems to hang in stasis as we leave behind a past self. —Lauren Kane  Read More

Still from Autumn de Wilde’s Emma.

The coronavirus has thrown a wrench into Aries season, but plans for my March birthday remained unchanged. I watched Autumn de Wilde’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma entirely alone. I am a harsh critic when it comes to film versions of Austen and consider myself a purist—a champion of the Pride and Prejudice BBC miniseries, which culminates in Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy diving into a pond at Pemberley, scantily clad by Regency standards. As far as Emma is concerned, I am a tried-and-true disciple of Clueless and find Cher Horowitz hard to match, even by a silky-skinned, pre-Goop Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 version. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is the perfect Emma, exuding a quiet, even intimidating confidence; her tight blonde curls and perky ruffs are a flawless manifestation of her character. Emma’s world, too, is an appetizing spectacle in de Wilde’s film, the walls of the Woodhouse estate painted in decadent pinks and greens. To match, every inch of the banquet tables is covered in absurd towers of cakes, puddings, and tarts. Against my recent sluggish tendencies, Emma has inspired me to action. I will surely emerge from this quarantine an accomplished lady with a penchant for matchmaking, clad in only hand-stitched ruffs, and always poised for a contra dance. —Elinor Hitt  Read More

Ladislav Klíma.

Prince Sternenhoch is lovelorn, despite his qualities: “Leaving aside my family and wealth, I may boldly say of myself that I am a beau, in spite of certain inadequacies, for example, that I stand only 150 centimeters and weigh 45 kilograms, and am almost toothless, hairless, and whiskerless, also a little squint-eyed and have a noticeable hobble—well, even the sun has spots.” He meets the silent Helga, whom he instinctively loathes and swiftly marries. She opens up, travels as a brigand, finds her métier as a demon, and starts to murder “like a doctor.” Ladislav Klíma’s (1878–1928) The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, styled as the eponymous noble’s edited journals, is a phantasmagoric freak-out, a work of consummate madness. It is gross and wretched; it is a Tinder date in a pandemic. Sternenhoch lives in a succession of ghoulish castles. He transcribes his titters and cackles and—after he is possessed by the spirit of his defenestrated Saint Bernard, Elephant—his barks. He schemes to make a gorilla cry and invests his fortune in a nut. Helga is killed, gains a swift promotion in hell, and visits to torment. Perhaps they reconcile, when she confesses, “My financial outlook is atrocious, my rabbits all died suddenly, and I have come to realize I lack artistic talent.” The truth is impossible to discern: the tale is all delusion, but for Klíma, delusion is all there is. In A Czech Dreambook, Ludvík Vaculík remarks that “Klíma’s horror stories have no more than a poetic effect on me. I can read them last thing at night and then have a nice peaceful bureaucratic dream.” For Vaculík, Sternenhoch might offer no relief from those anesthetic dreams proscribed by the state, but at present I could do with a good night’s sleep. Besides, I was moved. In Klíma’s “Autobiography,” which is appended to this edition—vividly translated, like Sternenhoch, by Carleton Bulkin—he writes of his life spent in “consistent divergence from all that’s human”: he eats only raw flour and raw horse meat, gobbles mice half eaten by cats, and “would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox.” At that, I put the book down and immediately washed my hands. Then I opened it again. —Chris Littlewood  Read More

Still from Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, 1979.

I first learned of the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger through her association with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian writer about whom my colleagues are probably sick of hearing me ramble. Ottinger has directed a few stagings of Jelinek’s plays, and Jelinek herself appears in Ottinger’s 2007 film Prater. But Ottinger is worth seeking out on her own merits. She uses a punk sensibility and a sense of heightened theatrics to create radically feminist films that are wildly stylish—and wildly stylized—in their approach. As luck would have it for those of us in New York, Metrograph is showing a series of her films this weekend. I’ve seen only Ticket of No Return, her 1979 masterpiece depicting one woman’s quest to drink herself to death in West Berlin (it’s much funnier than it sounds), but I’m eager to see more, including 1981’s Freak Orlando, Ottinger’s carnivalesque take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Still from And Then We Danced

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire captured critics’ hearts, and seemed a sure shot to capture mine. An acclaimed French lesbian film? Made for me! And yet, though I did like looking at Adèle Haenel’s incongruously contemporary face in period garb, the overblown, gestural romance left me un-aflame. “Do all lovers feel that they’re inventing something?” Heloise asks Marianne before they first sleep together, and I wished that something more precise, more personal, were being invented. I found that specificity in a different international gay film, And Then We Danced, which follows a delicate-boned dancer as he tries to keep his hands from fluttering during traditional Georgian dance, his only path out of a country where he cannot survive. Shot in four weeks on a minuscule budget, the film received a standing ovation at Cannes. In Georgia, it was met with such violent far-right protests that it closed after three screenings, but a queer Georgian youth movement has mobilized around the film, and its soundtrack, as a beacon of hope. The movie’s portrayal of first love made me bite my lip, but even more vivid were the moments of tenderness between two brothers, between grandparents and grandchildren, and the spaces the camera inhabits in Tbilisi, from nightclubs to cramped apartments to ballrooms. It’s a love letter to Georgia that asks simply: Love me back. —Nadja Spiegelman  Read More

Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Photo: Nina Subin.

Anyone who has googled their own name knows the curious thrill of watching the page populate with alternate identities. Percy, the narrator of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (out next week), suddenly finds herself awash in that potent mix of familiarity and alienation. She indeed googles herself not long after receiving a new exhibition catalogue of photographs, taken by her ex-fiancé, of a naked woman with a hidden face. Percy feels certain the woman is her—she recognizes the apartment, the body—but she cannot prove it, and the more she insists, the less plausible it all starts to seem. Previously a person of apathy, Percy has long been satisfied to be taken through life by a slow-moving current as invisible to herself as it is to those around her. She learns she is pregnant and keeps not mentioning it to her husband; she goes out for long walks at night, makes money in vaguely nondescript ways, and seems generally on the brink of disappearing from her own life. The arrival of the catalogue upends her complacency and sends her reeling into a quest of self-discovery and assertion amid the social landscape of post-9/11 New York. Stevens uses her wry perspective and lucent style to pose a deceptively simple question of personhood: How could you prove who you were? —Lauren Kane  Read More