TOBI'S DESK

DAWN KASPER, “MICHELLE FRANCO” (2003), ANNA HELWING GALLERY, CHICAGO ART FAIR. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery. Around the turn of the millennium, when she was twenty-three, the artist Dawn Kasper began picturing herself dead. Then a first-year graduate student at UCLA Arts, she was spending a great deal of time in isolation in her studio, and the rest of her time consuming material that revolved in some way around violence: video nasties, death-scene photographs by Weegee, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silk screens, etc. Eventually, a nagging thought set in: However many entries she slotted into her ever-expanding mental Rolodex of female death scenes—Janet Leigh bleeding out in a motel bathtub, or Sherilyn Fenn having her pretty head cracked open in a car crash; Teri McMinn’s slender shoulders being sickeningly thumped onto a meat hook, or the sister in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl being slashed through with an axe—she would never have the opportunity to see her own de...

Halloween decorations, Black Bull, Wetherby, West Yorkshire. Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons. While every story in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost is eerie—as the collection’s title might suggest—the eeriest is the one about three babysitters. “Three women,” the narrator remembers, then corrects herself: “three girls,” though all older than she was. As a child she thought of them as the pretty one and the wicked one, both of whom she loved, and the boring one, whom she disdained. When she grew up and went to college, she found she couldn’t really see her own body except when she compared herself to other girls—whether “ugly or pretty, beautiful or gorgeous, if she was plain but sweet, if I wanted to look like her or not.” Boys, too, she evaluated by proxy: if his girlfriend was pretty, he was desirable. What she didn’t know was that, at the same stage of girlhood, her three original models were already vanishing into women—defined no longer by their own prett...

Olga Kryazhich’s destroyed apartment. Photograph courtesy of Kryazhich. I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to  On the Front Line  by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable? I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war...

Katherine Dunn. Photograph courtesy of Eli Dapolonia. Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love , her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool. After her first novel, Attic , was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Ea...

Illustration by Na Kim. 18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal No vascular calcification. No renal calculi. The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology. Single left renal artery; no early branches. Single preaortic left renal vein. Single right renal artery, branching laterally to the cava. Single right renal vein. No extrarenal abnormality. The plan is for a left nephrectomy.   ***   My family likes to joke about the time I threw my brother to the alligators. We were in our early twenties, and on our wayto the Everglades in Florida. The taxi driver taking us there from our hotel on a nearby island stopped at a swampy clearing off the freeway. “They only feed at night,” he said, not particularly reassuringly.  (This was also a man who swore on his children’s lives that he had seen the Florida “bigfoot” twice.) “In the daytime they’re as harmless as dogs.” He encouraged us to take a look,...

“We are a nation whose fate is to shoot at the enemy with diamonds.” From Diane Severin Nguyen’s If Revolution Is a Sickness (2021). When I show up for New York Film Festival’s 9:30 P.M. opening-night screening of White Noise , Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the lobby is already swarming with television executives, publicists, and Lincoln Center benefactors. No one seems to have known how to dress for either the event or the weather. (Puffer coat and sheer tights? Sandals and spaghetti straps? Sensible backpack or Prada bag?) “They told me the vibe was black-tie,” a woman in a sequined gown says to her husband guiltily. He has very clearly been forced to wear a tuxedo. I watch some groups trying and failing to cut the line by flashing the branded wristband we have all been given. I find my seat and settle in for a Q&A with Noah Baumbach and members of the cast, including Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. They crack s...

Iranian protesters on Keshavarz Boulevard in Tehran. Licensed under CC0 4.0 . Before this September, I hadn’t heard from Yara in months. They’re an Iranian journalist who has reported for the country’s most prominent newspapers and publications. We first met in New York in 2018 and bonded over the difficulties that come with reporting on Iran: they were rightly afraid of being arrested for their work, and I’ve been afraid that I will no longer be able to return to the country where I was born due to writing about it from abroad. As the Islamic Republic began to escalate the crackdowns on journalists, activists, and civil society, Yara—a pseudonym I’m using to protect their identity—was forced to leave Iran. But when their father was diagnosed with cancer, they had to return. They messaged me to say they were going back and let me know I likely wouldn’t hear from them. If the authorities knew that Yara was communicating with me, an Iranian dual national who works for t he New York ...

Courtesy of Nancy Lemann. I first read Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints in one sitting, on an airplane. I was spellbound, moved, and deeply charmed. Who was this woman? Why had I never read her before? How was she capable of articulating an experience of youth that, in all its wastrelness, was exactly like my own despite being completely different? Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann’s fiction does not flow in the normal direction but loops in circles and rides along on digressions that resemble the chaos of real life. The book is remarkable for its restraint and for its lush detail. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about a young woman named Louise who has returned to New Orleans from college in the North; she finds herself thrust back into the richly entangled social world of her childhood, back among the people she has always known, including Claude Collier, the only man who can ...