Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of expansive dioramas recall Duchamp, Emerson, and the American suburbs. The documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is in limited release now.

Artist Lorna Simpson has turned from photography to film, creating three-dimensional installations on voyeurism, betrayal and desire. She has returned to photography for her show, Gathered, up at the Brooklyn Museum through Aug. 21.

English actor Rupert Graves appeared in five films in the fall of 1997: Intimate Relations, Mrs. Dalloway, Bent, Different For Girls and The Revengers’ Comedies. American actress Nicole Burdette figures out how he got there.

Writers Allan Gurganus and Donald Antrim fax and phone this raucous conversation on sex, love and laughter during the AIDS epidemic, the subjects of Gurganus’s novel Plays Well with Others.

Louis Auchincloss has chronicled the lives of America’s upper class for over fifty years. Critical, mannered and witty, he discusses his book, The Atonement and Other Stories, with philosopher David Carrier.

Marie Howe and I met to talk on a sweltering afternoon in a borrowed New York City apartment. I had sort of known Marie for years.

Rilla Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, stems from her family’s stories of the migration west to Oklahoma. This novel tracks the legacy of that journey: the violence, the clash of native and European cultures and the pioneers.

Out on the road, Los Lobos’s Louis Pérez and King Changó’s Andrew Blanco get down on ska, Godzilla and growing up Latino in the new America.

This year Paula Vogel amassed a small mountain of awards for her new play How I Learned to Drive, which premiered at the Vineyard Theatre, directed by Mark Brokaw. Like much of Paula’s work, it handles brutal themes in a seductive, almost musical way, winning the audience with truth and irreverent humor.

When I met Walton Ford, in 1981, he was pretending to be a gorilla in the Bronx Zoo. It was his first exercise in Acting Class. 

Miss Beatrice’s ostrich farm was so big you could get lost on it.

Elegy for the Harris Theatre

At Forty Second Street before the changing of the light
and bus station at Eighth there was a movie house: a pit

There does indeed exist a strange kind of brain damage. I have a friend who is a housewife in her thirties. When she talks with others, her left eye will not stop blinking.

Early light seeped through the green plastic bags taped over the window, and made the room feel like the bottom of a swamp. 

It seemed like a miracle when the Germans called. The brass at Wunderleather wanted my husband Peter to establish their direct mail business not only because he was gifted, but most importantly he had been born and raised in Berlin.

Subway

The IRT rattled the customed, ignored noises

1. Wishful Thinking

At a time when a lot of artists get a lot of attention for acting out rock ‘n’ roll fantasies (or pretending to live the lives of starry-eyed groupies), it’s refreshing to see a young artist fantasizing about opera divas—and then realizing these fantasies in lifesize paintings of imaginary prima donnas

The only International style building in New York, The Museum of Modern Art of 1939, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrel Stone, is once again scheduled for renovation and expansion

On the cover of Elliott Smith’s CD either/or is a picture of the musician with Ferdinand the bull tattooed on his arm, the horns covered by his black t-shirt. 

If influence alone is an artist’s measure of true worth, then with the reexamination and subsequent recombination of Jamaican reggae music into British electronica and drum ‘n’ bass, it seems as if one of reggae’s original pioneers, Lee “Scratch” Perry, is finally about to be given his due. 

Susana Baca exemplifies how an artist makes the world a stage. 

Majoun is a collaboration of composer, performer, producer, American Richard Horowitz and Tehrani Sussan Deyhim. 

When D.H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature, “The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached,” he could also have been invoking the maverick American artists…

Referred to by its filmmaker as the “ultimate low-concept movie, a movie without a one sentence description,” Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of four men seemingly obsessed by animals…

Habit is low budget and gritty, fitting for its setting in the lower Manhattan bars, tenement apartments, and Italian festivals of summer—you can almost smell the sausages and peppers smoldering.

Bob le Flambeur is a ’50s French heist film in which a small-time hood tries to knock over a casino. It is a film that Raymond Kaiser rents, a film which ironically prefigures the trajectory of an American family in Frederick Barthelme’s eleventh work of fiction, Bob the Gambler.

From his earliest spare fictions, Hear the Wind Sing and Norwegian Wood, through his recent, steadily more baroque and textured novels, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami nudged contemporary realism into fable…

Charles Frazier can neither be praised nor blamed for having his revelatory first novel, Cold Mountain, released into what can rightly be called a crisis in book publishing. 

J.M. Coetzee has been long-recognized as South Africa’s finest novelist. His key novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1982) and The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), plus his five other works of fiction, are all distinguished by a reticence to divulge any personal information about his own life. 

Now comes An Irish Eye, the story of a young orphan girl called Dervla O’Shannon and her quest for a rather mysterious elderly gent called Corporal Stack.

Keith Mayerson is hard to pin down. Just when you have a handle on his work, he shifts in some unforeseeable but intuitively right way. He made a splash in 1994 with a 60-plus drawing suite retelling the story of Pinocchio from a queer perspective.

Brice Marden’s The Muses is a marvelous painting, horizontal but consisting of vertical linear movements which will reassure those who find relief in the potentially figurative.

Robert Stivers’s photographs are eerie reveries, dreams in which the face or figure of a person you’ve desired or loved or hated or have been terrorized by hovers uncomfortably above your body in the darkness. 

Al Souza is a Texas artist originally from Massachusetts. His work, like Robert Rauschenberg’s of the ’50s, functions in the gap between art and life.