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The Book Review

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The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

Robert Caro on 50 Years of 'The Power Broker'

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely reshape New York City and its surrounding environment for generations to come. Like Moses, Caro’s book has exerted an enduring and outsize influence. This week, Caro tells host Gilbert Cruz how he accounts for its enduring legacy.

Kate Atkinson on the Return of Jackson Brodie

The British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since publishing her first book in 1996. But she may be best known for her Jackson Brodie series of crime novels. Sarah Lyall speaks with Atkinson about the sixth entry in the series, "Death at the Sign of the Rook."

21st Century Books Special Edition: Isabel Wilkerson on 'The Warmth of Other Suns'

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Isabel Wilkerson joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her 2010 book about the Great Migration.

Book Club: 'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante

The New York Times Book Review recently published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

21st Century Books Special Edition: Jennifer Egan on 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'

As part of its recent “100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Jennifer Egan discusses discuss her Pulitzer-winning novel about the music industry, "A Visit From the Goon Squad."

Liz Moore on Her Summer Camp Mystery "The God of the Woods"

A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. On this week’s episode, author Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about her new novel “The God in the Woods.”

What We're Reading This Summer

On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz chats with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the books that have been occupying their attention this season.

21st Century Books Special Edition: George Saunders on 'Lincoln in the Bardo'

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, George Saunders joins host Gilbert Cruz.

Hosts & Guests

Gilbert cruz, george saunders, sarah jessica parker, min jin lee, colson whitehead, lev grossman, mj franklin, joumana khatib, lauren christensen, griffin dunne, ratings & reviews.

Very weird that you’ve never read house of mirth!

From five stars to one.

Robert Caro recounted Moses’s blocking of any light rail lines in Long Island, a design that led to unbearable human costs as people get stuck in traffic for up to five hours a day five days a week and Cruz finds this funny??? And then Cruz follows up with a question that tries to find humor about this situation?? This is why I had been a listener since the Sam days, but bailed on it a month after Cruz took over. Get rid if Cruz!

cyndyluwhoo

MJ, please practice your presentation and lose the unnecessary word “like”! I find myself starting to count the number of “likes” you use and then have to stop listening. I would love to stick with the discussion but the irritation over the adolescent speech pattern chases me away.

Summer reads

My favorite episode for now. I learned but mostly I laughed. Thank you for teaching and tickling me.

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• Channel The New York Times
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• Years Active 2006 - 2024
• Episodes 507
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• Copyright © 2023 The New York Times Company
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See New York Times bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates in Des Moines and get his new book

New York Times bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates is coming to Des Moines to talk about his newest book "The Message."

Beaverdale Books will host a discussion with Coates about "The Message," which comes out Oct. 1. Those who purchase a ticket will also receive a copy of Coates' new book, where he takes readers to three resonant sites of conflicts and examines how stories that are told, or not told, impact people's understanding of reality.

What is Ta-Nehisi Coates' 'The Message' about?

"The Message" includes three intertwining essays about Coates' trips to Africa, South Carolina and Palestine. With his first stop in Dakar, a city in Senegal, Coates also finds himself in a mythic kingdom in his mind at the same time.

Next on his journey, Coates visits Columbia, South Carolina, where he shares about his writings facing book bans and the backlash followed by the United States' reckoning with history. A city where statues of segregationists stand over public squares, Coastes uses Columbia, as an example of the deeply rooted American mythology that is still visible to this day.

Coates spends the largest portion of his book detailing his trip to Palestine. There he sees the devasting effects of when easily people are misled by nationalist narratives instead of listening to stories of those living in Palestine.

Who is Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Coates is an American author, journalist and comic book writer. He worked for "The Atlantic" where he covered cultural, social and political issues regarding African American and white supremacy, according to Beaverdale Books' website . His book "The Water Dancer" was selected by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club.

When can you see Ta-Nehisi Coates in Des Moines?

Coates will share "The Message" at 6:30 p.m., Oct. 14, in the theater at Franklin Event Center located at 4801 Franklin Ave., Des Moines.

Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. The discussion will be moderated by Rekha Basu, retired opinion columnist for the Des Moines Register and author of "Finding Her Voice."

How to get a free copy of 'The Message'?

Tickets to see Coates are $40 per person and can be purchased at Beaverdale Books' website . Each ticket holder will receive a free copy of "The Message." There will also be copies of Coates' other books for purchase as well.

Kate Kealey is a general assignment reporter for the Des Moines Register. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @Kkealey17.

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At Delcore, Erdem, and JW Anderson, Book Ladies Are In

They say reading is fundamental! In the past few years books have increasingly played a starring role in the fashion discourse as designers seek inspiration in literature, sometimes sharing the books they’re reading with guests as invitations, or leaving them on their seats as gifts.

In London, Erdem Moralioglu looked to  The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian novel published in 1928 and swiftly banned in England for the next two decades, and to its author, Radclyffe Hall, “who was born Marguerite and went by John later in life,” as the designer explained to Sarah Mower at his show. His clothes were a reflection of impeccable masculine tailoring of the 1920s, and Moralioglu combined them with his signature effervescent high femme dresses.

Two looks from Erdem’s spring 2025 collection inspired by The Well of Loneliness, a 1920s lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall.

At JW Anderson , meanwhile, Jonathan Anderson cited Clive Bell, a British art critic who formed part of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal coterie of writers and artists (and interestingly, an economist) who shared the value that one’s main purpose in life was love, creativity, beauty, and “the pursuit of knowledge.” Anderson printed an excerpt from an essay on art and design by Bell across dresses and shredded knits. He didn’t go into detail about the inspiration but rather told Mower that it was a reflection of his thoughts on the fashion industry. “It’s more like this idea of starting from a blank page. Where is the next decade going, and how do we work with it?” Previously, Anderson cited Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” at the Loewe spring 2025 menswear show , and shared an excerpt from a Danielle Steele novel,  The Affair, with guests ahead of the Loewe fall 2021 show .

At JW Anderson, a text from Clive Bell was blown up and printed across dresses and knits.

But few have been as outwardly ambitious with their use of literature as a part of a runway show’s messaging as Daniel Delcore , who showed his new collection in Milan today. His muse this season was a  very  well-read scientist, who never leaves home without a book written by a female author, whether she’s going to work or to a party. Delcore’s reading list included—in the order seen at the show—Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s  To the Lighthouse, Hannah Arendt’s  The Human Condition, Rachel Carson’s  Silent Spring,  Donna Haraway’s  Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , Octavia Butler’s  Parable of the Sower, Judith Butler’s  Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Jane Austen’s  Pride and Prejudice , and finally Susan Sontag’s  Against Interpretation.  (Sontag is proving to be a real designer favorite!)

A model carries Hannah Arendt’s  The Human Condition at Delcore’s spring 2025 show.

It’s impossible to think that Delcore chose all these titles at random, as they all have to do with, well, the actual human condition in the year 2024—from  Silent Spring,  which documented the environmental harm caused by the use of pesticides and the way the American public was lied to about it, to  Parable of the Sower, which is set in a post-apocalyptic America in which society has collapsed thanks to climate change and economic equality. Add a few books and essays on the theory of aesthetics, performance, and the act of looking and being looked at, and, well, this is a full-on liberal arts education on the runway. It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in Paris, but at least for now, we have plenty of reading material to keep ourselves occupied.

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‘New York After Dark’: Renowned photographer Dustin Pittman showcases his most candid work in new book

If Dustin Pittman’s ego had taken up the space it deserves, there wouldn’t have been enough room for all the people who showed up at Bookmarc for the launch of the first collection of his photography, “Dustin Pittman: New York After Dark.”

Although Pittman was afraid no one would show up, the line went around the block of the West Village bookstore on Bleecker Street — and probably half of those people went away empty-handed, as copies sold out well before the line ended.

Co-written by Roger and Mauricio Padilha and published by Rizzoli, the 270-page coffee table book is chock full of boldface names. It’s a feast of candid black-and-white images taken between 1967 and 1982 of folks such as Divine, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Lou Reed, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Gloria Swanson, Andy Warhol, Jackie Kennedy, Mick Jagger—the list goes on and on.

“This book is about you; it’s not about me,” Pittman recently told a capacity crowd at the National Arts Club at an event organized by Maria Soccor and Jason Rand, the co-chairs of photography there.

“Dustin is our modern-day Cartier Bresson, with the social acuity of a Slim Aarons,” Rand opines. “The work is driven entirely by his own journey and experience in various, often gated worlds or “tribes” as he calls them. 

Soccor adds, “In every one of Dustin’s photos, you can feel him dancing and moving through every moment that he captures.  Your senses are automatically heightened and you feel you are in the very moment the photograph is taken.  He makes you feel a part of the magic that is happening.”

“The people in the pictures are my friends,” Pittman relates. “The pictures aren’t posed; they are unguarded moments.  I’m doing the same thing now that I was doing when I started taking pictures of my friends when I was six years old.”

Pittman knew they were the right fit because “I’ve known them for 25 years and they knew my work. I’ve shot for them. They knew the time period. And they had a head start – they knew my history and my Instagram. I knew they’d do a great book. We did it in six months.”

Mauricio Padilha says that it wasn’t difficult to choose the images due to the fact that “with hindsight, we are able to focus on who from that time had become important historically and should have been included. For example, the image of a pre-fame Madonna wouldn’t have been of interest to publishers back in 1981, but today, that image is a goldmine!”

Roger Padilha admits that the hardest part was “organizing the disparate events to make a cohesive visual history of New York’s 1970s and 80s scenes, as Dustin was photographing super diverse subgroups of NYC society from uptown to downtown and everything in-between.”

“I love the book!” Pittman says. “It’s a time capsule of the period from the Summer of Love to the AIDS crisis. It’s about the days when people carried books instead of cellphones and models in fashion shows got changed in the sewing rooms. I wanted the right balance of music, social causes, and historical culture. Most of all, it’s a book about love.”

Pittman will be in conversation at Rizzoli Books on Oct. 2. For more info, check out www.rizzoliusa.com/author- events  . His next show will be at the Eerdmans gallery, info can be found at  www.eerdmansnewyork.com. He is online at poparchives.com and on Instagram @dustinpop .

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WOLVERINE: REVENGE Is a Blood-Soaked Wild Ride Through the Marvel Universe (Review)

Skeletor's panthor gets new origin, mirroring he-man's battle cat, thor's new weapon permanently removes his vulnerability to magic.

Marvel will continue its ongoing celebration of Wolverine's fiftieth anniversary by delivering another historic chapter the life of his rival Sabretooth , in what series creator Frank Tieri describes as " Gangs of New York, but with Sabretooth ." Set in the early 1900s, Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk will be the latest in the villain's infamous of bloodlettings over the centuries.

In the latest addition of AIPT's X-Men Monday interview series, Tieri offered the first details on Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk , coming at the end of the year. Tieri's story follows on the heels of the Sabretooth War , which brought Wolverine's Krakoan Era storyline to a breathtaking conclusion; with the villain having been killed off at the War's end, this new series takes the character back a century.

The Dead Don't Talk also serves as a sequel to Tieri's earlier series, Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth , a must-read for fans of the feud between Wolverine and Sabretooth .

Marvel Announces "Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk" Will Cap Off Wolverine's 50th Anniversary

Sabretooth: the dead don't talk – written by frank tieri; available in december from marvel comics.

Speaking with AIPT, author Frank Tieri discussed the genesis of Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk and its 20th-century setting. As he explained, the series serves as a follow-up to his previous Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth ; the opportunity to revisit Sabretooth in this setting arose as a result of the fact that the character had just been killed off once more in the "present-day" of the Marvel Universe. As Tieri explained:

Hey, it’s Wolverine’s 50th anniversary, you had to figure I was going to be involved in some way, ya know? [Laughs] And really, that “some way” was editor Mark Paniccia more than anything. Mark always liked how I’ve handled Sabretooth as a character and wanted to do something badass with him together. The problem was of course… SPOILER ALERT… Sabretooth was set to die. Which meant the story had to be an untold tale of his set in the past when, ya know, that whole dead thing wasn’t going to get in the way.

As he revealed more details about The Dead Don't Talk , Tieri exponentially increased the level of hype fans will feel for this series.

Wolverine: Revenge #1 delivers on the promise of its superstar creative team, setting up what could be an all-time Marvel Comics classic.

Tieri noted that the previous series featured Sabretooth working for Mr. Sinister, while the sequel will depict what happens when the amoral antithesis to Wolverine " ends up smack dab in the middle of the criminal underworld in Five Points NYC. " That is, Tieri's reference to Martin Scorcese's 2002 crime epic Gangs of New York is more than just a reference point for the temporal setting of his story – it serves as the basis of the series' plotline, as the author set out to deliver on " what a Marvel version of Gangs of New York looks like ."

Author Frank Tieri Will Mix Real History & Comic Book Action In "The Dead Don't Talk"

The gangs of marvel's new york.

Not unlike Marvel's Gang War crossover event , Frank Tieri's Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk will deliver a similar, early 1900s version of disparate criminal groups battling for supremacy in New York City . As much as his series is an homage to Scorcese, and the real history behind it, Tieri was upfront about the fact that he won't leave any opportunity for comic book magic and madness on the table. The author gave a tantalizing insight into the world of his upcoming book, noting:

One of the most fun parts of using a setting like this is seeing what a Marvel version of Gangs of New York looks like. So you have a mix of normal gangs… and then some not so normal gangs. A gang that use steampunk tech, a gang that have modeled themselves after the American Revolution’s Captain America… even a “Frankengang” that were stitched together by one of the good doctors ancestors. So you can guess when we drop Sabretooth in the middle of something like this it’s like dropping a ton of TNT into a forest fire, the explosion doesn’t only affect the criminal underworld but the entirety of 1900s NYC itself.

Amid all of this, Sabretooth will rise to prominence in New York's underworld.

The how and why of that rise will be the question at the heart of the story, as Sabretooth: The Dead Don't Talk will also proceed like a mystery. According to Tieri, the story will be framed by Wolverine's discovery in the present day of his enemy's role in the history of New York City crime. Tieri told AIPT:

We actually start with Wolverine, so as the events of Sabretooth: The Dead Don’t Talk unfold, we’re learning about what happened alongside him. We kick off with him in a bar — Satan’s Circus, the oldest bar in the Big Apple — having a drink after Sabes’ funeral when he notices some old pics of Five Points gang members on the wall… and Sabretooth is one of them! How the hell is this possible? From here Logan — and we — begin to learn this secret, violent history of his greatest foe as the gangster “Mad Dog” Murphy and we’re off to the proverbial races.

The thrill of the series will be discovering the life exploits of "Mad Dog" Murphy as Wolverine does, perhaps even putting his enemy, and their perennial battles, into a new perspective in the process.

"The Dead Don't Talk" Is The Next Great Chapter In Sabretooth And Wolverine's History

Essential pre- the dead don't talk reading: ruins of ravencroft: sabretooth – written by frank tieri; art by angel unzueta.

Frank Tieri is no strange to writing the character of Sabretooth ; as he noted to AIPT, fans eager to get their hands on The Dead Don't Talk should bide their time by reading Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth , the events of which the upcoming series spin directly out of. The teaser images released by Marvel for the new book suggest that it will recap the events of the prior story, but it is worth returning to for more than just the plot, but to get a sense of how the author handles Wolverine and Sabretooth.

[Readers] can be confident that Wolverine's fiftieth anniversary year will draw to a close with an exciting, and of course, bloody new chapter in the history of his greatest opponent, Sabretooth.

In short, he has a strong sense of their dynamic, and both respective characters' voices. If anyone can meet the high bar set by author Benjamin Percy's Sabretooth War and its incredible conclusion, Frank Tieri is likely to be among the best candidates. Readers will have to wait for more details about the series to emerge, but for now they can be confident that Wolverine's fiftieth anniversary year will draw to a close with an exciting, and of course, bloody new chapter in the history of his greatest opponent, Sabretooth .

Source: AIPT's X-Men Monday

The human mutant Wolverine (a.k.a. Logan) was born James Howlett, blessed with a superhuman healing factor, senses, and physiology. Subjecting himself to experimentation to augment his skeleton and claws with adamantium, Logan is as deadly as he is reckless, impulsive, and short-tempered. Making him the X-Men's wildest and deadliest member, and one of Marvel Comics' biggest stars. He's played in Fox and Marvel's movie franchises by Hugh Jackman.

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October 3, 2024

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The Posthumous Autobiographer

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Michel Leiris; illustration by John Brooks

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Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4

Throughout his long and varied literary career, Michel Leiris’s experiments in autobiography made him a central figure in midcentury French intellectual life. Yet his contributions are conspicuously missing from the current conversations about memoir, autobiography, autofiction, and other writing of the self. An unfocused student, Leiris fell in with the Surrealists and agreed, on a lark, to serve as the secretary-archivist on a two-year government-financed ethnographic expedition to Africa. His subsequent working life was split into two distinct parts that influenced each other obliquely. By day he was an ethnographer in his basement office at the Musée de l’Homme; after work he was an art critic and a literary figure renowned on the Paris scene. You could say that by looking at his own world with the same curious eye that he devoted to the peoples he studied, he undertook a lifelong ethnography of the self.

Frail Riffs ( Frêle Bruit ), the fourth volume of his grand autobiographical project, La Règle du jeu (known in English as The Rules of the Game , though the French title also sounds like la règle du je —“the rules of the self”), appeared in 1976 when Leiris was seventy-four, an age when most people are worrying about memory and decline—a worry that hovers in the book’s background, along with the sense that he’s an old hand at the genre. Scratches ( Biffures , 1948), the first volume of The Rules of the Game , was followed by Scraps ( Fourbis , 1955) and Fibrils ( Fibrilles , 1966) — all three translated by Lydia Davis. In Frail Riffs , translated with matching virtuosity by Richard Sieburth, Leiris is preoccupied not so much with finding the past as with tracing its long fade, with showing how his most beloved ideas have become outdated, like an old address book that you think you will always need but that you discover is full of useless phone numbers and the names of acquaintances who have died. Prone in all his books to metaphors of combat, bullfights, and duels, but also to confessions of impotence, Leiris evokes in Frail Riffs a phase of existence “when your witnesses have already died, leaving you there to duel on your own,” and “when life has become so lackluster that you really have to be a bonehead to complain that one day you’ll have to bid it adieu.” I like Sieburth’s choice of “bonehead” rather than “hardheaded” for the French buté . It’s the kind of insult you might hear in a frat house.

Simone de Beauvoir credited Leiris’s first autobiography, Manhood ( L’Âge d’homme , 1939), with inspiring The Second Sex . Leiris sparked her desire to bring to the surface of consciousness the myths that constrain and structure women’s lives, just as he had tied his own troubled sexuality to Lucas Cranach the Elder’s paintings of Judith and Lucretia—Judith, who beheaded men; Lucretia, who aimed the knife at herself. Susan Sontag, reviewing Richard Howard’s translation of Manhood in these pages, found the book “brilliant and repulsive.” 1 In the coldness of Leiris’s gaze, his controlled masochism, his de-idealizing physical description, his insanely detailed prose, the combination of feelings held at arm’s length and bundled in theory, the lack of transition from one section to the next, and the total disregard for the so-called narrative arc that drives American writing, we would be hard-pressed to find traces of what passes for memoir today, if it weren’t for his fervor never to abandon the quest for understanding himself and his adamant refusal to make himself look good.

This was a habit that began early, with the diary he kept during the expedition to Africa—known as the Dakar–Djibouti mission—from 1931 to 1933 and later published as a book with a writerly title: Phantom Africa ( L’Afrique fantôme , 1934). 2 Thanks to Brent Hayes Edwards’s 2017 translation, which includes excerpts from the letters Leiris sent to his wife, we have a rare account of the coercion with which the mission pursued its true purpose: to acquire some 3,700 art objects for Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (the precursor to the Musée de l’Homme, established in 1937, and to the indigenous art collections currently in the Musée du Quai Branly). The French Parliament’s interest in the enterprise was clear:

At the moment when the Colonial Exposition at Vincennes is highlighting our colonial economic methods…it is highly opportune to prove to the scientific world and foreign powers the interest that the government is taking in the study of the civilizations of our overseas possessions.

Leiris’s own position wobbles: Did the means justify the ends—getting to know African societies—or was this unacceptable exploitation? Some two decades later he published strong criticism of intertwined ethnography and colonialism in Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps modernes .

In 2018 a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron recommended that France return its ill-gotten artworks to their home countries in Africa. Since its publication, for a new generation of cultural critics Leiris has become exhibit A in a polemic against imperial thievery. Leiris’s descriptions in Phantom Africa of what happened on the Dakar–Djibouti mission, rich with on-the-spot detail of plunder and manipulation, stand in sharp contrast to the rhetoric coming from the museum’s 1931 activity report:

Buying ethnographic objects on the art market is a solution as expensive as it is unscientific…. How much more preferable, as long as there is still time, to proceed with a direct harvest on the ground, either by individuals on mission or by those on the spot who are familiar with our ethnographic methods. 3

For critics today focused on decolonizing the museum and imagining possible forms of restitution, Phantom Africa  can serve both as indictment and as evidence of a crime. 

Forgotten for his autobiographies but remembered as an accessory to plunder: clearly writers do not control their legacies. In this light it’s especially interesting to return to Frail Riffs , Leiris’s self-portrait as he anticipates his demise and attempts, in his own oblique style, a life review.

Leiris’s autobiographical project as a whole belongs to a form almost unrecognizable today, the product of an era when literary memoirs were driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words, according to an idea no longer in vogue that, in as much as one can express it, life is really just a text. Books like Sartre’s The Words , Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood , and Jacques Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other , or theoretical treatises like Jacques Lacan’s The Language of the Self , partake in this focus on language as the essence of self. “How did nickel, this common metal, make its way into the adjective nickelé ?” Leiris writes. Sieburth doesn’t translate nickelé , maybe because its sound ( nee-que-lay or nee-clay ) is truer to the charm of the word than the flat “nickel-plated.” The sentiment would be futile if Leiris didn’t develop it so brilliantly. We learn that as a child he “adored this word for its glint, its neatness, its rarity” and that it conjures helmets and trumpets, “the acid sheen of jazz instruments”—the very qualities he wants to bring back to his tarnished prose.

Throughout Frail Riffs are nods like this one to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who famously wondered how the word nuit (“night”) could sound so bright and the word jour (“day”) so somber. Leiris’s obsession with language bears little resemblance to the quests for survival we’ve come to expect from memoir—the recitations of trauma, feats of social mobility, accusations of sexual malfeasance, and embattled quests for recognition of ethnic, racial, and gender identities.

Yet reading Frail Riffs , appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris. In his existential manifesto “On Literature Considered as a Bullfight,” a preface to the 1946 edition of Manhood , he contemplates the bombed-out port of Le Havre and wonders what difference an intimate memoir could possibly make when the world is in ruins. To succeed, he argues, writing needs to show us at least the shadow of bulls’ horns—it needs to find words that put the author in danger.

It wasn’t clear to Leiris in 1946 where the bull’s horns would come from. Like so many intellectual men of his generation, he was subject throughout his life to moments of high drama and low depression, including a suicide attempt after a failed love affair and an erotic fascination with a local prostitute during his army service in Algeria. He harbored a series of aching dissatisfactions—with the shape of his body, with the limits of his prose, with his political misjudgments. His melancholy is offset by moments of levity—affection for his tailor, stories about walking his dog, Puck, to stay in shape. Not the least of his achievements is to have created stories and images of himself strangely devoid of narcissistic self-display.

If trauma and victimhood are missing in Frail Riffs , replaced by episodes of doubt and self-loathing, it’s in part because Leiris enjoyed a situation of extraordinary class privilege. He was a grand bourgeois by virtue of his marriage to Louise (known as Zette) Leiris, the stepdaughter of Picasso’s art dealer and greatest champion, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. When in 1941 Vichy’s second anti-Jewish statute threatened Kahnweiler’s right to own his gallery, Louise purchased the business, ensuring its survival. (The couple hid Kahnweiler in their apartment—a story Leiris never tells.) If Leiris had never published a line of memoir, he would be remembered through portraits of him created by the artists whose work he reviewed and championed: André Masson, his oldest friend in the art world; Francis Bacon, whose painting of Leiris appears on the cover of Frail Riffs ; Man Ray, who photographed him; and Picasso, who made a set of ten drawings of Leiris’s face. Each artist shows a man with “a broad, rather bulging forehead” (Leiris’s own words in Manhood )—by extension a man who thinks too much and who is condemned to record his every thought. We recognize Leiris, too, in Brassaï’s well-known photograph taken ten days after D-Day of the gang of “existentialists” rehearsing Picasso’s nonsensical play Desire Caught by the Tail : there is Leiris with his big head and slender torso, sitting on the floor with Sartre, Camus, and Picasso’s Afghan hound Kazbek.

Instead of anecdotes about celebrated friends, Leiris gives us Frêle Bruit. Sieburth transforms bruit (“noise”) into “riffs”—a fitting choice, akin to the musical process by which Leiris circles from one subordinate clause to another in order to grasp an archaic verb tense, an architectural detail, or the contents of a display case that becomes an exhibit of his life. Writing as an old man, he is suspicious of the coin of the realm of memoir—feeling:

Autumn leaves: not just a scatter of reminiscence and regret but a scurry of moments of remorse involving dirty little dusty nothings, evasions and wishy-washy hesitations, words that remained on my lips instead of being said out loud, actions that I should have taken but from which I abstained, senses of relief when alibis or ways out were offered to me….

That particular litany of regret goes on for another twelve lines, ending in

a mounting heap of fears, given my approaching winter years, as well as a certain disgust with those fears whose weight alone would be enough to bend my back, as if the sky might at any moment fall on my head.

These are salutary hesitations in a current literary climate so easily satisfied with triumph and tears. In a crucial moment of confession, he writes about himself in the third person:

Far from merely humiliating him, this admission of his decline will snowball into a hastening of his senescence, given that he has so arranged his life that the only thing still keeping him in shape are the walks he takes, sometimes under clear skies, sometimes under a screen of branches, every time he is presented with the occasion on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, as he overcomes his laziness, eager not to disappoint his dog’s quivering and ever more frisky expectations.

Leiris often chooses the third person—a way of trying out his future as “posthumous.” He acknowledges more than once his growing frailty. Yet there is nothing frail in Frail Riffs where syntax is concerned. A quiet virtuoso of French prose, Leiris identifies with Mallarmé, “who proved that one can simultaneously be both a soaring poet and a minor English teacher who ruffles no feathers.” If we consult his note card on Mallarmé, one among a collection of preparatory note cards gathered by Denis Hollier in his remarkable edition of Leiris’s complete works, we find a variant of that sentiment: “Mallarmé, who was neither a bad boy, nor a madman, nor an alcoholic, nor even a holy terror [ monstre sacré ], but an honest English prof—and who was nonetheless a great poet.” 4

But Leiris’s debt to Mallarmé doesn’t quite capture his literary posture. Always a political writer, he was a critic of the Algerian War, a supporter of the May 1968 student revolution, and an admirer of Cuba and China who, like so many in his generation, later castigated himself for having “whitewashed the horrors of the revolution in the name of the justice of its aims.” In one fragment, he describes the animals in his country house engaging in wholesale murder—a cat killing rabbits, a dog killing a kitten, the guinea hens killing a pheasant—and concludes that it’s the norm for every species “to try to dominate everybody else, not excluding the murder or the manducation of one’s enemies.” But for Leiris the intellectual temptation is never to dominate; it’s to ferret out his own bad faith:

To take sides with the oppressed even though I belong to the class of the oppressors, to write in order to set myself free even though I am a slave to my writing and would never want to give it up, to be afraid of getting my hands bloody but to accept that my comfortable existence is built on the sweat or indeed the blood of others, to decide that life is not worth living even though I made only the feeblest attempt to end it, to go on and on about love and poetry while living the life of a bourgeois, to dream of decisive action when I know I’m a dyed-in-the-wool intellectual, to refuse to believe in the supernatural while being plagued by superstitions (for example, that to predict the good is to invite evil), and, as if some invisible tribunal might require me to justify myself, to save myself as much as possible from the commission of the ultimate, unforgivable crime.

To which he might have added: to live well thanks to his wife’s fortune.

As a writer, he excelled at self-accusation, though he was often evasive about the most basic information. Given what we know about his milieu, his ties to Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, and Bacon, and his wife’s art gallery, it’s astonishing to consider what he doesn’t talk about. There are no gallery shows in Frail Riffs , no mentions of money or acquisitions, no name-dropping. Leiris stays true to an inner world of perception and obsession.

With so little penchant to dominate, much less murder, anyone, Leiris admits he can’t even get his dog to obey his commands. I’d like to think, in the autumn of 2024, that one writer’s hesitations, his rehearsal of his every failure, might serve as an antidote to the kind of triumphant thinking that can end in murder. In this genre, Leiris is unsurpassed. As he absorbs his daily antidepressant gelcap, he worries that his own greatest sorrows may have fallen under pharmaceutical control. And so he finds a new threat: the possibility that after all these years, he may have lost his ability truly to be miserable.

In 1984 Louise and Michel Leiris donated their collection of modernist masterpieces to the Museé National d’Art Moderne in Paris. A second donation, of Leiris’s ethnographic art and documents, went to the Musée de l’Homme before it was transferred to the Musée du Quai Branly, home of the artworks now under dispute. That Leiris would one day be posthumous—the idea obsessed him—not because of his unique sentences, his oblique vision, his unflinching self-critique, or even those donations, but rather because of his complicity in the illicit plunder of African art on the Dakar–Djibouti mission strikes me as wildly unfair, yet perfectly in tune with his own capacity for self-blame.

Dynamism & Discipline

Living the Nakba

An Entry of One’s Own

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More by Alice Kaplan

An exhibition of the Algerian painter’s work liberates it from the political symbolism of late colonialism.

May 11, 2023 issue

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue

Sixty years after the end of the Algerian War of Independence, “painful passions” on both sides continue to impede the reconciliation of the French and Algerian people.

November 18, 2021 issue

Alice Kaplan is a Sterling Professor of French at Yale. Her book Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris will be published in October. (October 2024)

“Odd Man Out,” March 5, 1964.   ↩

Reviewed in these pages by Kwame Anthony Appiah, March 8, 2018.   ↩

Quotations from the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the French Parliament are from Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France (Cornell University Press, 2013).  ↩

La Règle du jeu (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2003), p. 1236. Leiris constructed his books using file cards he kept as memory aids—he wove elements from 130 cards into the text of Frail Riffs .  ↩

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How Donald Trump Learned to Pass the Buck

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LUCKY LOSER: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success , by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig

My family took its first steps on American soil on a spring day in 1989. An uncle named Boris who had escaped the Soviet Union years earlier was there to greet us at the airport in Queens, insisting, despite our exhaustion, on a tour of Manhattan. After a winding journey, we emerged from the gritty commercialism of Times Square to find ourselves on 56th Street, at the base of a featureless black obelisk.

In that moment, even though I knew next to nothing about American culture, I understood Donald Trump exactly as he demanded to be understood. Erected on the ruins of the Art Deco Bonwit Teller department store, Trump Tower was as much a symbol as it was a building, a show of authority and strength as evident to a Soviet refugee as to a Staten Island native.

How a failing casino developer could maintain, and grow, an image of soaring success is the subject of “Lucky Loser,” a first-rate financial thriller by the New York Times investigative journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. Building on the duo’s previous Pulitzer-winning reporting, this long but brisk book charts Trump’s rise from real estate scion and ersatz businessman to the most unlikely of political populists.

Though it arrives on a crowded shelf, “Lucky Loser” is one of those rare Trump books that deserve, even demand, to be read. In good part, that’s because it applies the proper lens through which to view Trump’s career. In this telling, his story lies at the intersection of business and media, with politics arriving only as a secondary concern.

It’s a strength of “Lucky Loser” that the biographical details deepen the portrait as much as they foreshadow the plot. The book is a multigenerational saga that begins with the former president’s grandparents, Frederick and Elizabeth Trump, migrating from Germany at the turn of the century and settling in Queens, where they got into real estate, buying up vacant lots . Their middle child, Fred, joined the business and took advantage of the newly established Federal Housing Administration, which supercharged the market in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Creative only in his dishonesties — his buildings were dull boxes — Fred inflated his construction costs to secure generous F.H.A. loans and then skimped on construction expenses, pocketing the difference and setting high rents based on the original, fictitious projections.

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