David Malouf by Colm Tóibín
“A lot of the social structures of indigenous society have broken down very badly, but to have the energy and vision and imagination to actually change the techniques by which you express yourself, is something quite miraculous.”

Chris Ofili and Peter Doig have lived and worked since the early 2000s on the Southern Caribbean island of Trinidad.

“Dancing has the possibility of being a luminous, protean, and versatile element, and an element of the subconscious—if you get out of the way—and just dance.”

The infinitely prolific songwriter R. Stevie Moore will play in New York on August 11. He talks process and practice with artist David Shrigley, whose career was recently surveyed in a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery.

“So this photograph is like a short story telling of the way of life that had been going on in this one space over generations.”

“I’m attracted to the idea of a certain intertextuality, the way in which a character from one film gets quoted into another.”

“There is a reason why some people have compared directors to chameleons. You become invisible, take the color of what surrounds you.”
The Zero Meter Diving Team by Jim Shepard
Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been.

There’s an inherent failure in all traditional art media; while lives and time appear to move and change, an artwork remains forever a prisoner of its own birth time, and our subsequent need to preserve and consume it.
This First Proof contains the poems “Skin On Skin Off Skin On Skin Off” and selections from Halleluhjah Blackout.

Harold Schechter’s latest nonfiction work is an elegantly written true-crime story, rich in themes and vibrant details.
Ellen Harvey
Failure notice. By now we have all received any number of messages with this hyperbolic yet frightening subject line when our e-mails have bounced back.

Tris Vonna-Michell’s forthcoming exhibition at Metro Pictures features a range of installation narratives and sound edits. In this piece from 2007, Cathleen Chaffee illuminates the artist’s painstaking, detective-like process for his installations.
D-L Alvarez by Nell McClister
Nowhere in film is the power of love more apparent than in the slasher genre.

For eight years, the Brooklyn-based arts organization Booklyn has championed what it calls “peoplemade books”: artist books, zines, and other small press.

A few weeks ago I loaded the station wagon with popcorn and beer and we all piled in, off to enjoy a lost American family experience: the drive-in.

The year Columbus found and founded our New World also marked the final end of one particular Old World, the half millennium of rich coexistence and commingling of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish peoples, traditions, and languages in the south of Spain.

Let’s say it was not Steve Martin who had written this memoir of his early years as a standup comedian—or as he says in his poignant introduction, a biography of someone he used to know.
This First Proof contains an excerpt from The Devil’s Gentleman.

The Pale of Settlement was once the swath of land designated by Imperial Russia as the only legitimate home of their Jewish population, one they reluctantly inherited after partitioning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

For almost a decade, Francisco Goldman lived with the obsession of answering the question posed in his latest book’s subtitle: who killed the Bishop?