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Dan Duray

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Glorious Bastards: Himmler’s Brain Gets It In Laurent Binet’s New Novel

Consider, for a moment, the appeal to be found in the Nazi assassination. The glee with which we enjoy the death of a Nazi goes far beyond the fact that it’s guilt-free, justified cruelty because they’re so evil—though, as Stieg Larrson’s torture scenes taught us, that’s certainly part of it. Nazi murder conjures not just grim satisfaction but a sense of elation, of “righteousness”-—the kind found in the Bible but also the kind found on a skate park in the 1990s. Read More

Book Review

DyerZONA

Dyer Maker: Geoff Dyer Takes on Tarkovsky’s Craft, and His Own

Geoff Dyer’s topics can be feints. An essay about doughnuts turns out to be more about Nietzsche’s eternal return and the dissolution of place, while one about Marvel Comics hops to The Ice Storm, hallucinogens and the Renaissance. It’s easy to peg him as a riffer, the writerly equivalent of a jazz musician, especially since he’s written a book about jazz, but a bass player never knew such breadth Read More

9 Photos

Earbud Splitter

The Gift Guide Guide to Gifts: A Guide to Gift Guides

Everyone loves gift guides, even broke journalists who essentially haven’t spent money on anything that isn’t food or electricity in the past year. You don’t want our opinion about what to buy your loved ones this year, but we’ve gone to the experts and pulled some choice selections from their gift guides. Won’t you take a look? Read More

The Transom

The jewels on display in Moscow. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

The Girl Who Had Everything

“Hey buddy, you need some help? Some directions?” a hustler outside a diamond district boutique asked a slightly disoriented man last Friday morning. The man, who had just exited the Rockefeller Center subway stop, blinked in the winter sun and shook his head, apparently not in the mood to buy any diamonds. Read More

The Transom

Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer, as the Lunts of the lit set. (Photo courtesy of Mark Iantosca, courtesy of The New Inquiry)

Cub Kids Flock to the Jane

The main lounge of the Jane Hotel was probably the brightest most people had ever seen it on Sunday afternoon, as literati packed the room for a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, a scrappy postmodern novel that details those dubious adventures —Greta Garbo, in a tank, visits him at one point—and lifts around a quarter of its pages from other sources like Friedrich Engels and Washington Irving. Around 63 readers, identified by number in a program and on a giant screen to the right of the room, read portions of the text over a five-hour period, with memorable turns in the role of Mao from Kurt Andersen and a puppet. Read More

Galleries

Nicola Tyson Pens Letters to Manet and Picasso

“Figure with Tree” (Photo courtesy Petzel gallery)

The artist Nicola Tyson, whose twisted figures are currently on display at Friedrich Petzel were called “Lily Pulitzer meets a concentration camp” by one admirer at the opening, will hold a performance at that gallery on October 6 during which she will read letters to her forebears, among them Francis Bacon, Thomas Gainsborough and James Ensor. Read More

art online

VIP Art Fair to Return in February

The organizers of the VIP Art Fair announced that the online show will return with for a second round, with VIP2.0, Feb. 3 through Feb. 8–older, wiser, and a little more technically functional.

Organized by the James Cohan gallery, VIP blazed a trail that many start-ups have followed this year – Art.sy and Paddle 8 Read More

Crime

Photo courtesy of Google Maps.

Homicide Investigation Closes 21st Street

Chelsea’s hopping 21st Street was completely shut down between 10th and 11th Avenues earlier today due to a police investigation into a stabbing that occurred at 5 a.m. outside the Juliet Supper Club.The 23-year-old victim in the incident, Christopher Adames, later died of his wounds.

The club shares that block with Gagosian, Paula Cooper and Read More