More than most artists, each of Fiona Apple’s albums seems to exist on its own. Partly it’s that a gap of years separates each one, so that it inhabits its own niche in time; partly it’s that Apple finds a different approach each time. The elegant...
At the start of Levrero’s novel The City his protagonist leaves the house to buy groceries and, lost in the rain, flags down a truck. The next two chapters carry him further and further away from his original intention. (The first two chapters are here.) 3. When...
This is my translation of the first two chapters of Mario Levrero’s novel The City. The protagonist lives in a perverse universe where nothing he does produces the outcome he expects and his choices keep leading him further and further from home. By his own...
These are the movies that have stayed with me most over the last decade. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) Terrence Malick captures the way we actually remember childhood – not in coherent episodes but in intensely apprehended moments, like Jessica Chastain...
Hustlers (2019) – This is a textbook example of how a female point of view can transform even very familiar stories. The narrative strategies that writer and director Lorene Scafaria employs – the story’s events recounted to a journalist in flashbacks, the old...
The Parra family has the rare distinction of producing two major artists in a single generation: Nicanor, impudent antipoet who died only last year, and Violeta, folklorist, singer-songwriter and visual artist, who ended her own life in 1967. I read Victor Herrero...
