Fantasy

Yunes were human once. / They nursed babies and baked bread and made love beneath the shade of the willow tree. / Then they were drowned in the bog on the edge of town. / The marshlands kept them flawless. / Their skin tanned tight as a drum skin, sealing their spirits inside like caged dogs.

Fabulism and absurdity from an under-appreciated Italian master.

The novelists on Vietnam, Norman Mailer, and the dragon’s perspective.

Surrealism meets fantasy in The Last Days of New Paris, a recent novel by a British author of New Weird Fiction.

“Traditionally, a painting treats you to the front and center seats. I like the idea you might get a seat that’s off to the side.”

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.

Emilia Kabakov talks about her need to live between reality and fantasy, and discusses paint in comparison to installation.

Household archeology, bygone telephone etiquette, townball, and the teasing sepulcher that is John the Posthumous.

There were three. One was holding a cup full of his own semen; another, a burnt branch of sage; and the other, a solid block of quartz. Their intentions weren’t congealing as intended. This hasn’t been done before, a portal to another realm, another time, another space.

A selection from husband and wife team Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s House/Hold series (2011-12), plus a video excerpt of Family Portrait (2012).

This First Proof contains the short story, “The Giant Baby,” by Laurie Foos.

“tradition is one thing and conservatism is another. You conserve something that is not alive, something that no longer functions, that is rotten. If something is alive there is no need to conserve it. Nobody conserves a garden.”

Durante el mes de octubre la cineasta argentina Lucrecia Martel visitó el Harvard Film Archive para celebrar su primera retrospectiva: La Ciénaga , La Niña Santa , y La Mujer Sin Cabeza , sus tres largometrajes, se mostraron juntos por primera vez. 

Dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz’s work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor.

Thomas Shannon’s floating world has a precision that can be paired with dreams. Using Earth’s gravity as mean point, a kind of beginning, Shannon guides inert materials such as aluminum and wood to release their weight.

When I first saw David Lynch’s Lost Highway upon its theater release in 1998, I found myself seduced by what have become classic Lynchean touches: the opening sequence of bifurcated highway strip, its noirish titles, its lushly choreographed scenes and hearty use of the sexual and the grotesque—in sum, its unimpeachable stylishness. 

Fantasies of escape—from the doldrums, inadequacies, disappointments, alarm clocks, from the inevitability of the daily—take myriad form, most frequently geographical. To the seaside, to the mountains, to the suburbs, to Paris!

Geoffrey O’Brien and Luc Sante unearth the subtext that was Times Square in the ’60s, “the round-the-clock festival of junk culture and lyrical sleaze.”

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

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…