When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.” 

“It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie,” the greatest living actor continued. “Oppenheimer’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.” 

But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre and before that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—will basically always be the Chinese Theatre. I first encountered it in the film critic Nick Browne’s classic 1989 essay “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as an Ideological Form,” which examines the Orientalism of early film aesthetics, and the twenties trend of exotically decked-out American movie palaces that culminated, in 1928, “in the construction of Sid Grauman’s still famous (indeed iconic) Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, described as deriving ‘its inspiration from the Chinese period of Chippendale.’ It opened in May with the premiere of De Mille’s King of Kings with an evening of high ceremonies hosted by D. W. Griffith.”

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.

Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) 

U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 128 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.”

What That Quilt Knows About Me at the American Folk Art Museum, through October 29: This exhibition, recommended by our intern Anna Rahkonen, showcases forty quilts, some dating back to the nineteenth century. The quilts were made by a wide-ranging group of artists and craftspeople, among them a pair of enslaved sisters from antebellum Kentucky and an unnamed British soldier during the Crimean War. 

Kazuo Hara retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, August 16–31: At Anthology, a run of the intimate, activist documentaries of the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara—including portraits of life with cerebral palsy (Goodbye CP, 1972); victims of asbestos exposure (Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 2016) and mercury poisoning (Minamata Mandala, 2020); and an increasingly unhinged Pacific War veteran seeking answers about the mysterious deaths in his regiment (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, 1987). Most exciting to our associate editor Amanda Gersten: the by all accounts brutally voyeuristic Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974). After Hara’s ex-wife leaves him for a relationship with a woman, he follows her to Okinawa for a year, where she opens a nursery for the children of sex workers, joins a women’s commune, begins seeing an American GI, gives birth to her second child on camera, and enumerates Hara’s many flaws for his then girlfriend (who is also the film’s producer).

The Maison de Balzac is located in the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, in the heart of the former village of Passy. If you visit, chances are you’ll approach it along the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and perfectly shaded, and boasts, according to Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t remember seeing when I visited in April. What I do remember seeing was an unaccompanied Alsatian with some sort of harness girding its chest, loping through a small nearby park. When I looked around, vaguely nonplussed, I noticed a clinique vétérinaire directly across the street.

If I’d had to explain to myself why, with only three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute need to visit the home where Honoré de Balzac, a writer I wasn’t even that familiar with, had composed the bulk of The Human Comedy, a fictional project I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m not sure what I would have said. Probably it just seemed that if anyone would have had an interesting house, it would have been him. Open one of his novels at random, and chances are you’ll find a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, today, can seem hard to place. Take Monsieur Grandet’s living room, for instance, as it appears in the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We learn the room has two windows that “gave on to the street,” that its floor is wooden, that “grey, wooden panelling with antique moulding lined the walls from top to bottom,” that its ceiling is dominated by exposed beams. “An old copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show its thickness, reflected a thin stream of light along an old-fashioned pier-mirror of damascened steel.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t begin to differentiate an old-fashioned model from a sleeker, more modern one. In a sense, this feeling of being lost was part of the appeal of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it. 

Which is another way of saying that when I contemplated a sort of generic Balzacian space, a vision of plushness, of pure and overwhelming material profusion would unfurl in my mind: a little room fitted out with dark wood and damask curtains, gilt mirrors and stubbornly bombé furniture, its walnut shelves and limestone mantelpieces offering stable quarters to a full range of dandy’s trinkets, like engraved pistols and silver-handled riding whips and even, glowing palely in the manufactured dusk like a sturdy snowball, a fine Sèvres sugar bowl—every detail, down to the motes of light-struck dust spinning in the sepia-toned air, tuned precisely to some ideal of costive, costly languor. You know, luxus, as the Romans must have done it. Who wouldn’t want to disappear into this?

So, here I was. There was a false start: a pleasant little gate with a plastic-sheathed slip of paper taped to it declaring that the gate was no longer the entrance to the Maison de Balzac. Through the gate I could see a set of steps leading down to the grounds of the museum, which occupies a sort of plateau between the rue Raynouard above and the rue Berton below, but I was directed instead down the road some thirty yards, to a squat, flat-roofed, glass-walled hutch. When I entered, the young woman manning the information desk swiftly rerouted me to a side door, which deposited me at the top of a set of open-air stairs that, it turns out, are completely accessible from the street. Dizzily, I descended.

The painter Alex Katz is best known for his portraits—colorful, flat, rich, and realistic, in a style that has become immediately recognizable as his own. Katz has always been fascinated by poetry, and especially by the work that came out of the New York School in the fifties and sixties. “What Katz found so compelling about this scene was its complete disregard for aesthetic precedent, irreverence for an academy of poetry, and gravitation toward vernacular expression, where words were less pondered and possessed an immediacy that spoke of nowness,” writes the art historian Debra Bricker Balken in the forthcoming book Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets. These qualities have something in common with Katz’s own work, which might help to explain why he has been so drawn to collaborations with poets—among them illustrations, prints, and covers for books by Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Katz has also painted portraits of a number of poets, including his personal favorite, Frank O’Hara, who was himself interested in the crossover between painting and poetry, and occasionally jealous of painters themselves. (“I am not a painter, I am a poet,” one O’Hara poem begins. “Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”) Below are several of Katz’s literary collaborations, including a cover he made for this very magazine in 1985.

Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We hadn’t been back to the artists’ colony together since. Standing on the lawn, looking up at the great mansion, we were a bit like bears on the wrong side of the zoo. When we were residents, we were free to roam the grounds, walking so close our coats swished together as we circled the four small lakes that dot the rich people’s estate. You don’t even notice there are visitors, welcome only on some woodland trails and in the rose gardens, laid out like those at a French palace. 

Whatever memories were stirred as we retraced our steps weren’t sharp. It was like rewatching a movie with different actors in the parts. Even if we’d entered the buildings now and the rooms where we’d talked, I doubt it would have made much difference. The movie I watch is in my head, and I run it more or less all the time.

This is the movie. I arrive at Yaddo lost. I’m absolutely lost in my life, and I turn sixty at the colony, and there’s something about a man there I find easy to be with. The first time we talk, we’re in a little parlor outside the room where meals are served, and I don’t know how Foucault comes up. It will turn out Foucault is always on Richard’s mind the way this conversation in the little parlor is always, more or less, on my mind. I say, “I find Foucault overdetermined.” Or maybe I say, without qualification, “Foucault is overdetermined,” and even though Richard loves Foucault and doesn’t for one moment believe this is true, he bursts into a smile because he’s never heard anyone say this before, because he’s not sure what I mean by it, and because he’s astonished by the chutzpah of such a blunt summation. 

Book lovers, take heed! Hundreds of hardcovers are on sale for 50% off at Barnes and Noble now. If you’ve had your eye on a bestseller or new release, here’s your chance to stock up. You’ll find both fiction and nonfiction for adults, YA titles, and kid lit, too. From memoirs and epic fantasy to mysteries and mythology, there’s something for everyone.

Below are some of the most popular titles offered. The prices listed factor in the sale. Happy book buying!

Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The random casts of participants are a fun study of group dynamics. These shows allow me to witness tender, precarious moments between lovers and strangers. They prove that the mundane and dramatic often go hand in hand. Watching them, I’ve cried, laughed, and shouted at the screen. I’ve become more aware of how we are all living a life of scenes, surrounded by and involved in a seemingly never-ending narrative.

Recently, my husband and I watched Single’s Inferno, a reality show in which young men and women glamp on a desert island. If they “match” with each other, or win challenges (like mud wrestling), they get to helicopter away to a fancy hotel for an overnight date. The stragglers cook together and end up bonding. These conversations encouraged me to write scenes in a less plot-centric way. Often in fiction, it can feel like there is no room to just “hang out.”

Change Days, meanwhile, is a show about couples at an impasse trying to decide whether they should stay together or break up. When the participants go on dates with new people, the viewer knows their backstories and partners, which gives added layers of context and raises the stakes. Watching the couples argue felt more relatable and expansive than watching shows whose participants have left their lives behind and are presented as clean slates ready for new futures. Getting this private peek into the complicated, painful, confounding, beautiful, terrible tangle of long-term relationships felt thrilling and sometimes overwhelming.

Scrolling around on KOCOWA (Korean-language Netflix, basically), I discovered His Man, a show in which eight single gay men live with one another and date one another. His Man felt groundbreaking to me. It showed me personalities and a kind of camaraderie that I’d never seen on TV before. One man sometimes did makeup for the others. There was a date on which both men wore flowers behind their ears. The show had a bizarre, funny rule: every night, the men were summoned one by one to a phone booth on the roof to call one of the others on his cell phone for a minute, without revealing his own name. Sometimes, a man would call his roommate on the show, and have to sheepishly return and face him after the call. Some men would receive many calls every night. Others never received any. By the end of the show, they’d all become great friends, even though some hearts were broken along the way.

Earlier this summer, I shared the news that Brave Books — a right-wing publisher creating books with a pro-God, pro-“Liberty” conservative angle authored by right-wing “stars” like Kirk Cameron — planned to do a nationwide storytime on August 5. People across the country who follow this publisher made room reservations at their local libraries to host these events under the banner of “free speech.” Hosting such storytimes at the public library would “prove” how much they are needed.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have loved playing victim these last few years. They continue to claim their beliefs are under attack and that places like public libraries have been at the forefront of purposefully silencing them and have turned to indoctrinating children with a pro-LGBTQ+, anti-white agenda. We know this to be completely false and fabricated, but truth doesn’t get many clicks on Fox News or other such outlets. Truth also doesn’t allow washed-up stars and proud homophobes and insurrectionists to perpetuate their persecution complex. The Brave Books storytime was the perfect opportunity to prove some kind of point about their rights being squashed and that the masses are demanding more books and events at public libraries aligned with a single-minded, right-wing hate agenda.

But…how did the event actually go?

There is nothing on Brave Books’s website to suggest it was an overwhelming success. There are no photos from events that took place across the country, though their website claims that they’ll be hosting this as an annual event “to promote free speech and traditional values in public institutions.” They may have hosted 300 events in 46 states but a few wingnuts renting a room and sharing propaganda does not a success make.

According to journalist Steve Monacelli in the Texas Observer, some of the Texas events had a solid turnout, but others had fewer than 20 show up; he rightly points out that these same “free speech” defenders are those actively seeking to get books removed from the very facilities which allowed them to use the space for their prayer circles and bigotry-based book sharing. Monacelli points out on social media that the leader of the largest event in Texas has been photographed with a confederate flag and has been interviewed by the January 6 commission, claiming to be a member of the Oath Keepers — a truly upstanding citizen to put in front of children that the same people claim need to be kept pure and innocent.

If you’re using books in part to escape from the world for little blips of time as a breather to recharge your batteries, August book clubs once again offer a huge array of excellent picks for you. Most are exclusively virtual book clubs, one is in-person, and a brand new book club will do both. Bonus: many of them are author-inclusive if you’re a fan of hearing the author chat about their own work.

Let’s start by playing my favorite game: did more than one book club pick the same book this month? The answer is: Yes! And it’s a tense read!

For those who like backlist books, you have one memoir, one essay collection, and one picked on its 25th anniversary by a beloved author! There’s a sweet summer book by an author with a deep backlist, a popular reviewer has a new book club with a powerful nonfic selection, there’s a coming-of-age novel, and there’s a debut contemporary. You also have options for romance picks, and the first adult novel from the author of The Poet X! It’s another great month to join, or follow along, with a book club!