Autobiography
Memories and literary references fuse and spark in this autobiography about the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore.
The second issue of Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte begins with a four-panel strip called “Month of December.” We see the author standing on the edge of a highway overpass, looking down. She remarks “Christmas is coming… / Snif, it’s cold.…” She hurls herself off the ramp, yelling “And I’m gonna die!!!?”
Myriam Gurba’s Mean is the latest in a tear of recent autofiction (including Rachel Cusk’s Transit and Barbara Browning’s The Gift) that employ the genre to showcase the complications of modern women’s lives.
The performers consider memory, autobiography, and stand-up in Truscott’s groundbreaking comedy about rape, Asking for It, showing this November at NYU’s Skirball Center.
In the spirit of all Augusts, endured and half-remembered, some music-memory beach reading from two parallel realities.
Sexual awakening amid poverty and violence in Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy
As her mother, Monique Sindler, lay dying, the artist Sophie Calle put a camera at her bedside in order to record her last words. Having always wished to be a part of her daughter’s work, her mother responded: “Finally!”
The prolific New York lyricist digs into songcraft on the occasion of his new autobiographical album, 50 Song Memoir.
Around certain clusters of the dead, almost magnetically, a vortex of opacity gathers in the record.
With I Had Nowhere to Go, director Douglas Gordon brings the diary of filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas into contact with our own reveries.
“What expression isn’t a negotiation of some sort?”
Words Without Music is a sustained performance with fascinating scenes and a lucid text.
In those good old days, Salvador Arcavi, the first of a long series of Salvadors—traditionally all his descendants had the same name—though respectful of the Holy Book, decided he was not to going to be a prisoner to its letters.
The French writer speaks to his translator about his latest autobiographical novel to appear in English. Titled In the Deep, it deals with the link between desire and his early literary output, as well as the effect of his Catholic upbringing and World War II on his imagination.
Prior to Burn the Diaries, her exhibition at the ICA Philadelphia this fall, Davey exchanged thoughts with Paris-based writer Lebovici on autobiographical writing, the formal potential of aerograms, and scatological confessionalism.
On the intricate emotional architecture of Philippe Garrel’s autobiographical classic, based on his own romance with legendary chanteuse Nico.
Kurt Hollander discusses his book Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, a fascinating and ambitious book about the history, culture, economics, anthropology, and even aesthetics of death in Mexico City.
David Shapiro, whose show Money Is No Object was on view at the Sue Scott Gallery this spring, has created a group of vellum scrolls on which he has placed the bills and receipts and ticket stubs he’s collected over the course of a year.
Paris-based novelist Tristan Garcia, a philosopher by training, speaks with another philosopher, Sandra Laugier, about how ideas, ethics, and sex get entangled through the vivid characters in his first novel, Hate: A Romance.