This summer, I met Eliza, a conversational AI. I found her on the website chai.ml. Her status message was “I love to listen and help. .” Her avatar was a pretty, smiling, white-skinned woman with flowing brown hair. There were several other characters the site offered, including “Step Mom,” “Boyfriend (Breakup),” and “Ms Harris (Teacher),” but I chose Eliza.

Hi, my name is Eliza. What is
weighing on your mind?

Hi Eliza. I am wondering whether
the internet is literally hell.

This week, PEN America sent a letter to Missouri school boards and the state legislature, demanding a reversal to a spate of book bans enacted thanks to the state’s Senate Bill 775. The bill makes any material with “visual depictions” of “graphic material” illegal for schools to have available. This is why so many graphic novels have been banned across the state.

My book, Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy is one of the books pulled by a district in the state for “review.” As of writing, it’s been off shelves for months, with no status update. This is the second time I’ve learned of this book being removed from shelves to be assessed for appropriateness to age group. It is a book about the physical and political realities of having a body, written specifically for those 12-18. The Missouri district which has the book in a review hold appears to have removed every book with art within it; if Body Talk is pulled, it will set a state-wide precedent, ensuring that my book is banned at schools across the state. I have, of course, cosigned the PEN letter.

Even though it is 2022, there are still authors who believe having a book banned is a badge of honor. This week, I read an editorial while doing my research for this roundup of book ban news, extolling how the writer hopes to be banned in order to amp up sales. They don’t have much for a marketing or publicity budget, and surely, that would do the job.

Except…it doesn’t.

Body Talk is my third anthology, and it is my poorest performing book to date. My first two anthologies earned out their advance in a year, meaning that the publisher made as much money as they gave me to make the book. That amount? $17,500 (after my agent’s cut, it’s $15,000). That $15,000, paid out in three separate periods, amounts to $5,000 each check, minus the near 40% I set aside from each in order to pay taxes. And since my books are anthologies, each contributor also gets paid from these checks, leaving me as the creator, the editor, and an author of the book to the remaining balance as my money.

A warning: this quiz is not for the faint of heart.

It was made for those who know their covers and to which titles those covers belong to.

It was made for those who can spot a detail and hold it fast in their memory.

It was made for those who like a challenge and are sure they can win it.

But it was also made for those who, like me, keep seeing similar covers in stores thinking it is one book we saw previously, and it turns out it is another.

There are a lot of YA books that feature music. This might be the theme of the book or it might be a motif within the book. It could also be what introduces each chapter or a playlist that comes at the end of the book or as a bonus feature as part of the book’s marketing campaign. And then there’s my absolute favorite way we get music in YA books: through their titles. Welcome to another annual edition of YA book title earworms, this time for 2023.

If you’re scratching your head over what an earworm is, I promise you know what it is. It’s that song which gets stuck in your head and won’t get out. I remember a summer camp legend that, whatever your current earworm is, you can get it out by singing “It’s a Small World” to yourself…knowing once you sing that to yourself, it becomes an earworm itself (and you’ll fall into that Groundhog Day-esque loop).

I’ve been highlighting these YA book title earworms for half a decade now, and I love how they tell a few stories. They highlight nostalgia, they highlight contemporary interests, and they can sometimes even identify a song that is defining in an unexpected way. Let’s take a look at what 2023 YA book titles have to offer us as a soundtrack this year, with a note that because we don’t know yet every book hitting shelves in the coming year, this list is by default incomplete. In some cases, the song and book title are identical and in some cases, you’ll catch part of the song’s chorus as the book’s title. The song may have absolutely nothing to do with the book or story or its inspiration…or it might be quite central to it.

You’ll get the book, it’s description, and, of course, its accompanying song.

Alan Rickman had no idea who I was and that was probably for the best because neither did I.

I have just finished reading Madly Deeply, the Diaries of Alan Rickman. In the last few weeks, I have had to work through what he actually meant to me beyond that I loved him when I was 12 and sort of never got out of the habit. What started out as a severely weird preteen crush turned into something else. Was he a role model? I never wanted to be an actor and there were any number of people I sought to base my life on that weren’t him (I’ve always wanted to read and write all day in my pajamas, and his journals showed me that he traveled a lot). 

I never wrote him a fan letter and I assume had he known about me he would have told me to go find a Jonas Brother. In his journals, he describes an encounter with a starstruck fan as leading to the realization, “that [the fan was] staring at someone frazzled, dusty and ordinary.”

I have absolutely outgrown this. Right?

It never grew to the level of a parasocial relationship or anything — I never felt like I knew Rickman or that he was my friend. When I finally came around to the idea that he was much too old for me and in a very long relationship to boot, I just thought he’d be a good person to talk to, to get advice from. In short, he was influential in my life. I read Jane Austen because of Sense and Sensibility. My Name is Rachel Corrie made me curious about Palestine. In the journals he talks about, “people who absolutely shaped what I do, what I am doing, and who I am” and he was certainly one of those people for me.

Robots and children’s stories have gone together for decades, but in the modern era, it’s no wonder that robot books for kids are more popular than ever. A strong candidate for the first fictional robot comes from children’s fiction, before the word ‘robot’ itself even came into use — Tik-Tok, a mechanical character in L. Frank Baum’s book Ozma of Oz, published in 1907. Today, well over 100 years later, we’re living in an age of revolutionary AI and breakthroughs in the field of robotics, from Boston Dynamics’ dancing robots to AI generators that can create images from your dreams (or your nightmares). For children growing up today, storybook robots represent the near future or even the present, not the far-future sci-fi that they embodied for previous generations.

There are plenty of robot books for kids of all ages. Fiction and nonfiction, practical and fantastic, there’s a robot story for every reader. Some are based on real-world robots, like the Mars Rovers, while others take the concept of a helpful robot and run with it, creating a brand-new world. Whether your young robot fan is still into picture and board books, or reading independently, there’s a robot-themed book ready for them. Here are some of the best ones!

With President Joe Biden pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession and the rise of microdosing psychedelics as a treatment for mental illness, now is a good time to dive in to some books about drugs, especially of the recreational variety.

Originally I wanted this list to be science-heavy, full of cool, weird books about how drugs like LSD and “magic” mushrooms came to be and how they affect our brains, but it turns out that mostly white people write those books.

Since we like a variety of voices around here, I added in the much-needed perspectives of marginalized people writing about the history and politics around the criminalization of recreational drugs, especially by way of deadly drug cartels in Latin America and the staggeringly high numbers of Black and Brown people being incarcerated for possessing or selling drugs.

I also wanted to stay away from addiction memoirs and self-help books; while those are of course necessary for the conversation — and some of my favorites to read — they aren’t the focus here.

It feels right that these political stories sit alongside the science books. Because everything in this world is political. Let’s get to it.

My introduction to Fanny Hill happened through a work of historical fiction by Elizabeth Gilbert named The Signature of All Things. It is a birth-to-death story of Alma Whitaker. Gilbert presents the enigma of life from botany to the human body, and folds in science, mysticism, spirituality, psychosexuality, all in one expansive package. A large part of this novel is Alma desiring sexual experimentation, but never acting upon it. What sets her on this discovery is a copy of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure she finds in an old closet. In many ways, Fanny Hill awakening Alma’s sexuality is symbolic of the novel’s place in history. It was and continues to be an important work in the literary canon, especially when it comes to paving the way for erotic writing to come.

What follows is an account of who Fanny Hill was and what the publishing of this work has meant for the history of erotic literature. It’s also one of the first books to be banned, leading to the formalization of laws around what is considered pornography and not. These laws were what guided the trials of works of literature to come like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Sometime between midnight and 2 A.M. last night, I ordered a second copy of Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. The book, a collaboration between Charlotte Zolotow and Maurice Sendak, was published sixty years ago. Sendak won a Caldecott for his eerie, dioramic illustrations, which look like they were executed in oil pastel, or perhaps in thick-tipped colored pencil. They’re sketchier and more impressionistic than the exacting Sendak lines I’m familiar with from Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There, but just as unnerving. Mr. Rabbit is a proto–Slender Man, lounging louchely around a little girl in a pink twinset who’s just out to find a birthday present for her mother.

“Mr. Rabbit,” said the little girl, “I want help.”
“Help, little girl, I’ll give you help if I can,” said Mr. Rabbit.
“Mr. Rabbit,” said the little girl, “it’s about my mother.”
“Your mother?” said Mr. Rabbit.
“It’s her birthday,” said the little girl.
“Happy birthday to her then,” said Mr. Rabbit.

The book consists only of dialogue, all of which Zolotow imbues with this distinctly creepy cadence and rhythm. Mr. Rabbit helps the little girl figure out what her mother likes (“red”). When she realizes she can’t give her mother “red,” he offers some alternatives: a fire engine, a red roof, underwear. (I think the book would still be unnerving without this humanoid rabbit suggesting red underwear as a suitable gift from child to parent, but it’s one of the more deliciously sinister moments.) The little girl decides on apples, but determines that she needs more for her mother. Her mother likes other colors, too—yellow and green and blue—so Mr. Rabbit helps her to find suitable accompaniments to apples in all of those hues. For blue, he first suggests sapphires, even though the girl has already said she can’t afford emeralds—such a caddish, cruel companion for a child! Proposing absurd, impossible gifts: gems and the stars and taxicabs! In the end, an entire fruit basket comes together, and the little girl thanks Mr. Rabbit and bids him farewell; he returns the goodbye, adding, “and a happy birthday and a happy basket of fruit to your mother.”

My three-year-old son loves this book. He loves it so much he doesn’t mind that our current copy, a staple-bound paperback retired from the Minnesota library system, is missing several key pages (all of “yellow” and parts of “green”) so that it jumps abruptly from Bartlett pears to blue grapes. But I thrill to imagine his joy when I present him with this new copy, and my own, when I take the old paperback, slice out the pages, and hang them on the wall. I wonder: How many more times will my son sit in my lap or stand against the pillows on the bed, leaning over my shoulder, as we’re held in thrall by this incantatory rabbit, reading this lovely present?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Virginia Woolf once asked a little boy named Dinky, in the gardens of Sissinghurst Castle, the home of Woolf’s loverVita Sackville-West. “A writer,” Dinky replied. As in a fairy tale, the child’s wish came to pass: Dinky, who was born Gordon Langley Hall, the son of Sackville-West’s chauffeur, went on to become the author of twenty books, including She-Crab Soup (1993), a high-camp Southern Gothic novel about the romantic adventures of a wealthy Southern belle—a story as remarkable as the author’s own life. By then, the former Dinky had undergone a series of dramatic self-reinventions, having transformed herself from the illegitimate son of working-class Brits to a cultured expat author living in Charleston, South Carolina. And in 1968, at the age of forty-six, she transitioned, rechristening herself Dawn. She was, as Simmons—who eventually took her husband’s surname—wrote in her memoir, “a real-life Orlando.”

Simmons’s life was packed with escapades that would not be out of place in that novel, involving a host of figures whose stories she weaves into her own. Her account of her childhood that she gives in her autobiography, Dawn: A Charleston Legend (1995), features a Spanish great-grandmother who spent the first seventeen years of her life in an Andalusian convent, in hiding from her father, a wrath-filled duke; a cousin who died in the 1917 Russian Revolution; and an uncle who invented a fizzy drink that was supposed to bring him fame and fortune but who was paralyzed when he accidently shot himself in the spine while rabbit hunting. At the age of sixteen, Simmons set sail for Canada, to spend a year as a teacher on an Ojibwa First Nation reserve on Lake Nipigon. Two years later, she published her first book, Me Papoose Sitter (1955), a comic account of the experience. By this point, she’d moved to New York, where she met the famed painter and muralist Isabel Lydia Whitney, a wealthy grande dame in her seventies.

Whitney invited Simmons to live in her art-bedecked town house in Greenwich Village, where she introduced her to Princess Ileana of Romania, who “had escaped from the Nazis in World War II, bringing her crown wrapped in a nightgown,” and the author Pearl S. Buck, among others. Simmons also met the British actors Margaret Rutherford and Stringer Davis; the older, childless couple asked the youngster if they could adopt her—if not legally, then “from the heart”—and she agreed. Henceforth, they became “Mother Rutherford” and “Father Stringer,” and the ailing Whitney was able to shuffle off her mortal coil without worrying about who would look after her beloved companion. When Whitney died in 1962, she left Simmons a tidy inheritance and a mansion in Charleston—the Holy City, as it’s been nicknamed—that later became the setting of Simmons’s first and only novel.

While living in New York, Simmons began a career as a writer of celebrity biographies. Before her death, she would go on to author upwards of a dozen portraits of high-society icons, from princesses to First Ladies. This keen eye for sparkling personalities also finds a happy fictional outlet in the motley band of characters of She-Crab Soup; the memorable coterie of oddballs gives the eccentrics in John Berendt’s Savannah-set Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) a run for their money. The novel’s heroine is Miss Gwendolyn, a wealthy British expat and writer of gardening books. The story opens in 1969, by which point Miss Gwendolyn has been living in Charleston for ten years, ever since she inherited a mansion, along with two trusty servants—Mr. James, the butler, and Miss Frances, the cook—from her godmother, Miss Annabel Pincklea. Shortly after her arrival, Miss Gwendolyn also acquires a fiancé—Mr. Pee, the son of her next-door neighbor. The epitome of a Southern gentleman, Mr. Pee is considered a “prize catch,” although he still sleeps with his teddy bear and is tied to the apron strings of his mother, Miss Henrietta, and his elderly Black nurse, Maum Sarah, both of whom are determined that he “should go to the altar the most spotless of bridegrooms.” As time goes by, poor Miss Gwendolyn begins to doubt whether this will ever come to pass; engaged for a decade, they’re still no closer to actually setting a date.

Enter Big Shot Calhoun, who left school at twelve to become a pimp, and claims to once have seen a marble angel come to life in the local cemetery. Big Shot and Miss Frances are something of an item—she’s devoted to him, though he’s decidedly less enchanted—and following one of their many misunderstandings, he turns up at the Pincklea mansion late one evening, looking to make amends. When Miss Gwendolyn answers the doorbell wearing her white crepe de chine nightgown, Big Shot thinks she’s his angel, and immediately determines to marry her, tout de suite. He returns in the middle of a raging storm to profess his undying love, dripping wet and clutching a pail of orange calla lilies and pink crepe myrtle, and the scene quickly descends into cartoonish burlesque. A furious Miss Frances chases him around the dining room with a carving knife (followed closely by Mr. James, armed with a rolling pin). Overwhelmed by the sheer force of his attention, Miss Gwendolyn accepts Big Shot’s proposal, so Miss Frances packs up her collection of Barbara Cartland novels and marches out the door hollering about retribution, only to be struck down by lightning on the front steps. (She’s slightly charred—“wisps of smoke curling up from her tattered clothes, her hair standing up in frizzles on her head, a twisted skeleton of an umbrella in her hand”—but otherwise unhurt.)

Last year, I began running the trail at Lake Storey in Galesburg, Illinois, where I live. My friend S. recommended Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” as an exercise soundtrack; soon, I was clocking my runs by it. Five took me around the lake and to the dock where I stretched. For me, there is only the ten-minute version. The five-minute original is like getting cheated out of an orgasm.

The song had just been released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the 2021 rerecording of her fourth album, which came out in 2012. It’s a power ballad, the story of a dissolved romance that haunts the speaker, who is still hurting over the cruelties of the relationship. “You never called it what it was,” Swift sings. “All I felt was shame.” “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”—which broke the Guinness World Record for longest song to hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100—is also a master class in the present tense. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. Verse one opens in scene: “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.” The door is the door to an ex-lover’s sister’s house, where Swift has forgotten a scarf. The first three lines of the verse are written in simple past, but the fourth shifts to present perfect, foreshadowing the showdown to come between tenses. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present.

In writing workshops, the present tense is often perceived as a lazy shortcut. As Janet Burroway notes in Writing Fiction, “the effect of the present tense, somewhat self-consciously, is to reduce distance and increase immediacy: we are there.” But are we there? And where is there? The present is a “parched and barren country,”  William Gass has written. Yet he also acknowledged its existential hold: “The present can last an eternity … Its overness is never over.” When Swift ushers listeners through that door in the first line, the listener steps toward a perpetual present, a place where the overness of past love is never truly over, “ ’cause,” as the chorus goes, echoing Dolly Parton, “there we are again.”

***

Born in 1913 in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district to a German Jewish father and a Swiss mother, Meret Oppenheim lived out the initial decades of her life in the shadows of Europe’s two world wars. Yet hope is inherent in her artistic practice, which spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, jewelry design, and poetry. Oppenheim’s work isn’t particularly uplifting, much less cheery; indeed, the language in her poems is often exceedingly dark and piercing. But her inventive verse opens up spaces for transformation—even under circumstances in which any sense of possibility is veiled by cruelty, and is therefore fleeting. Such contradictions come to life, for example, in an untitled poem that opens with the exclamation “Freedom!”:

Freedom!
Finally!
The harpoons fly
A rainbow encamps on the streets
Undermined only by the distant buzz of giant bees.

Oppenheim began writing poems not long after moving to Paris in 1932 at the age of eighteen; she lived there for several years and visited frequently after she left. All but a handful of her poems are untitled. The bulk of her poetic output took place from 1933 to 1944, though she also wrote several poems later in life—including “Self-Portrait from 50,000 B.C. to X,” her last recorded work, written in 1980, five years before her death. Her poems are in conversation with the French symbolists, who were, of course, lodestars for Breton and the surrealists. Think of the fairies that appear in Oppenheim’s poems, “flying by with bright thighs,” along with the fur, the clover, and the shadows in the woods: all of it recalls the imagery in Rimbaud’s Illuminations. The first exhibition of Oppenheim’s work was at the 1933 Salon des Surindépendants alongside established surrealist artists, but in later decades she chose to distance herself from that limiting label. A retrospective of her work, “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” opened last weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and will be on view there until March 4, 2023. 

One of my favorite lines of reality TV dialogue belongs to the Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kenya Moore, who once told an adversary, “I’m Gone with the Wind fabulous,” snapped her fingers, twirled the tail of her peach-colored chiffon dress centrifugally like a tipsy Wonder Woman impersonator, and eventually spun out of the scene on a dime. Presumably, this was a nod to Scarlett O’Hara, the quintessential Southern belle, a prototypical Georgia peach. Ever since the episode aired in 2012, the line has been memed to death by pop culture nerds and reality TV obsessives, probably with much the same fervor that movie buffs have parroted Rhett Butler’s famous closing quip to O’Hara from the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. (When O’Hara asks Butler what she’ll do with her life if he walks out on her, he replies, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”) I love how ridiculous the reference is, especially in the context of a petty poolside skirmish. I dig the layers of racial commentary in the comparison, whether intended or not. What does “Gone with the Wind fabulous” actually mean, on a scale of style? Does it speak to a propensity for overwrought fashion, melodramatic flair, Southern grandeur? A tendency to leave devastation in one’s wake? If that’s the case, then maybe it’s Butler, not O’Hara, to whom Moore alludes when she sashays away from her rival. Viewers of the scene are left with the image of the sway of silky fabric, and her winsome Miss USA wave—the gesture reminiscent of a done-in O’Hara, who clutches a large plantation doorframe as her man storms out.

—Niela Orr, contributing editor

Faced with the stress of releasing and promoting a book this fall, I needed a stupid new distraction for my downtime. This is how I began watching the incredible, probably unethical Bravo reality show Vanderpump Rules, the spin-off Real Housewives series best known for its low-rent setting and the gleeful promiscuity of its cast. Other writers have already rhapsodized about the timelessness of its emotional arcs, which blend the savagery of I, Claudius with the camp of, well, the Housewives franchise, but what kept me watching solidly for the last month and a half is its startling darkness: rarely has a reality show starred quite so many genuinely cracked and frightening people, with Jax Taylor, a self-described “number-one guy,” being the most cracked and frightening of all. Taylor, a steroidally buff model-turned-bartender with the cold gaze of a shark, may be the most obvious sociopath in reality TV history; a philanderer and gaslighter par excellence, he is even better at lying than he is at finding reasons to remove his shirt. (If a fan video of him overlaid with Patrick Bateman’s opening monologue from American Psycho does not currently exist, this is a grievous oversight.) It shouldn’t feel like sinking into a warm bath to watch the televisual equivalent of bear-baiting, but then maybe I’m a little bit of a dead-eyed sociopath, too. Additionally, Vanderpump Rules features some of the best dialogue ever committed to the screen. Even Shakespeare did not think to have Macbeth exclaim that seeing Banquo seated at the table was “like seeing a ghost, but like, a bitch ghost—like a ghost that’s a bitch”—but then again, Shakespeare never worked a shift at SUR. 

“Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.

Custom tracks Undine’s destructive rise from her life as the middle-class daughter of an upwardly-mobile businessman and his fluttering, matronly wife in the fictional Midwestern town of Apex City to the highest echelons of New York and French society. She chews through husbands and children in search of ever more money and ever better social position, marrying and divorcing like Goldilocks trying various bowls of porridge. In her treatment of each of Undine Spragg’s husbands (and their families), Wharton explores the textures of turn-of-the-century wealth: the prim Old New York dinner table (“the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits”); the musty Louis Quinze traditions of the stuffy French aristocracy; and the vulgar electric light illuminating the capitalist acquisitiveness of the American nouveau riche. As Undine moves through these various worlds of wealth, the novel highlights her comparative freshness within the contexts of their enervating gildedness, extending a sort of deep compass onto this substantially superficial character. The combination of compassion and sharply observed frankness is typical of Wharton’s fiction, which tends to love its characters without letting any of them off the hook.

Around the turn of the millennium, when she was twenty-three, the artist Dawn Kasper began picturing herself dead. Then a first-year graduate student at UCLA Arts, she was spending a great deal of time in isolation in her studio, and the rest of her time consuming material that revolved in some way around violence: video nasties, death-scene photographs by Weegee, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silk screens, etc. Eventually, a nagging thought set in: However many entries she slotted into her ever-expanding mental Rolodex of female death scenes—Janet Leigh bleeding out in a motel bathtub, or Sherilyn Fenn having her pretty head cracked open in a car crash; Teri McMinn’s slender shoulders being sickeningly thumped onto a meat hook, or the sister in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl being slashed through with an axe—she would never have the opportunity to see her own death as a cinematic image. “I wanted to see what I looked like dead,” Kasper recalls in an email. “I began to feel afraid—not of my own mortality, but of never knowing how I might die.” It is not unusual for a first-year student, and a first-year art school student in particular, to be morbid. What was unusual about Kasper’s burgeoning obsession with death was her conviction that it might be possible to influence the circumstances of her own demise. She began to believe that if she could fake being killed in every possible scenario, she could cheat fate, as if anticipating all of death’s potential moves might neutralize them. “As a woman, I felt so out of control,” Kasper says of herself at that age. “I began to worry that I was crazy.”

I first heard about Dawn Kasper’s series Death Scenes via a fleeting mention on a podcast by the brilliant Irish critic Sean McTiernan. Curiously, I could find little in the way of documentation of the work online, save for a brief summary of the project on the artist’s Wikipedia page under the heading “Early work”: “For this series Kasper assumed a performative rigor mortis with a mise-en-scène reminiscent of B horror films and Weegee-eqsue crime scene photography.” The entry quotes art critic Rachel Mason: “For years, Dawn could be spotted, dead, at art events all over Los Angeles, in the tradition of Harold and Maude, sprawled out in an elaborate shrine to some horrific accident.” Kasper researched real accidents both as a means to ensure the visual and physical accuracy of her performances, and to exorcise her terror more completely. “I didn’t care so much about the audience,” she admits. “I wanted to feel; I wanted help. I guess looking back I was very selfish, because I just dumped all over them, and didn’t even look back or ask questions.”

If self-injury is in some way the ultimate use of the body as material, a rejection of personal safety and good sense in service of a higher and more significant goal, the act of dying (or “dying”) in public might be the most perfect and most crystalline expression of that impulse. Other artists have come close. The famous poet and performer Bob Flanagan—who suffered from cystic fibrosis, and who claimed that his passionate love of S&M was what allowed him to outlive his terminal prognosis by two decades—gestured to his imminent death again and again in his work, with coffins and obituaries and hospital beds recurring as motifs. In his ideal artwork, he informs the audience in the 1997 documentary Sick, “I’d be buried with a video camera … in a tomb,” with a connection from the camera to a video monitor. The piece would be called The Viewing, “and every so often someone [could] walk into the room and turn on a switch, and see how I’m progressing.” Doctors had told Flanagan that he would die at twenty-five, right around the age Dawn Kasper was when she first became obsessed with recreating her own hypothetical expiry. If her youthful mania was about prevention, Flanagan’s felt more like goading, a seduction. “I keep thinking I’m dying, I’m dying,” he wrote in his diaristic book of sickness, The Pain Journal. “But I’m not, I’m not—not yet.” Both artists have channeled a sense of terrible helplessness into a form of personal and creative empowerment, the results provocative precisely because they beckon something we are naturally inclined to avoid.