This week, we bring you reviews from three of our issue no. 240 contributors.

The documentary Rocco, which follows the Italian porn actor and director Rocco Siffredi, feels like a hundred perfect short stories. We learn that Rocco carries around a photo of his mother at all times. We watch Rocco and his teenage sons chat in their cavernous and starkly lit climbing gym/weight room in Croatia. We discover that Rocco’s hapless cameraman of many decades, Gabriel, is actually his cousin, a thwarted porn star. During one virtuosic shoot (Rocco Siffredi Anal Threesome with Abella Danger) Gabriel accidentally leaves the lens cap on, which they discover only after shooting the entire scene. There’s a surprising sweetness in Rocco, a man in the twilight of a certain era. “They used to focus on the women’s faces,” he says, sadly. He’s decided to retire. The final scene finds Rocco carrying a giant wooden cross on his back through the hallways of the Kink.com Armory. This tableau is the brainchild of Gabriel. “Because you die for everyone’s sins,” he tells Rocco.

—Emma Cline, author of “Pleasant Glen” 

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is about a lot of things: the last ever screening at Taipei’s Fu-Ho Grand Movie Palace; a ticket-taker who wants to gift half of a steamed bun to the projectionist; a young man cruising the theater for sex; and that lonely, amorphous feeling of THE END—not so much death as the cinematic mood of loss. When I heard about Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which was directed by Tsai Ming-liang and released in 2003, I could neither see it in a movie theater nor stream it anywhere. At the time, my brother was quarantining in a high-rise apartment building in Santiago, Chile. He found an illegal copy of it on the internet and sent it to me. I liked the criminality of this exchange. No character in Goodbye, Dragon Inn breaks the law, but it feels like there’s a crime going on. Part of this is due to the rain and the shadows and the grimy brokenness of the Fu-Ho Grand, but it’s mostly because Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a stripped down melodrama of longing. The ticket-taker is the film’s star. At one point, she goes behind the movie screen. The light hits her face. We seem to know nothing about her, but that’s not true. We know how, in the light of the screen, despite the forces that would stop her, she hopes and dreams. In this way, we know her exactly.

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will return to Turkey a marble head of the Greek deity Eros that was separated from a sarcophagus dating to the 3rd century CE. The move resolves a struggle of nearly a century to restitute the object.

The V&A described the artifact’s return as “a cultural partnership” with the Turkish government agency overseeing culture and tourism.  The loan agreement, which is set to last for a period of six years, acknowledges shared ownership between the Turkish government and the U.K. museum, which is state-run.

The Eros fragment was taken in 1882 by Charles Wilson, a British military official during a stint in Anatolia, when he discovered a Roman sarcophagus in the Karaman province of central Turkey. Wilson subsequently loaned the head to the V&A, which was then known as South Kensington Museum. It was gifted to the museum in 1933 after his death.

The V&A discussed returning the head to Turkey in exchange for a Byzantine antiquity. The museum’s then director, Eric Maclagan, openly expressed concern about potential repercussions of such a restitution deal on other artifacts held in British museums.

In 1934, though, the U.K. government authorized the marble head’s return to Turkey. To see if the marble head really was from the original sarcophagus, the V&A initially provided a plaster duplicate to experts in Turkey. The marble head continued to be held in storage in London into the late 20th century.

David Hammons, one of today’s greatest living artists, does not appear in The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons, a new documentary about him that is directed by Judd Tully and Harold Crooks. This won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows even a little about Hammons, who almost never gives interviews to journalists and has a tendency to be evasive with dealers, collectors, and curators. He’s an artist who is more often heard about than seen—a figure who often seems constantly present yet always just barely out of reach.

It’s not clear whether Hammons himself was ever given an opportunity to comment for this documentary, not that it really matters—he would have said no anyway. The late artist Steve Cannon alludes to this at one point when he says, “David believes that the less said about him, the better it is.”

Regardless, everyone seems to have something to say about Hammons, and The Melt Goes on Forever is chock-full of stories about him. Tully is a journalist (he’s published articles in this magazine), and Crooks is a documentarian; together, they have assembled an impressive array of interviewees, from artists like Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, and Fred Wilson to critics like Antwaun Sargent and Richard J. Powell, to shed light on a truly great sculptor whose objects are frequently shown and little understood by most who come in contact with them.

The picture of Hammons that emerges is that of an elusive chronicler of Black life in America who plays by his own rules. At times, it feels as if the viewer is the butt of Hammons’s jokes. For his justly famed piece Higher Goals (1986), he sculpted a grouping of basketball hoops that were so high as to be virtually unusable, even to a giant. For Concerto in Black and Blue (2002), a cult favorite among Hammons heads, he invited viewers into a totally darkened gallery and gave them blue flashlights to navigate the empty space.

“A good comedian, whoever’s speaking, has to know how to handle the hecklers, as well as those who aren’t,” Hammons tells filmmaker Michel Auder in archival footage. One way to deal with hecklers and fans alike, it seems, is to crack jokes that nobody completely gets.

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Join Dotun Adebayo, Andy Brassell and David Cartlidge for the first of our On The Continent Transfer Specials, coming at you every week here on the Ramble feed!

We get stuck into Barcelona's underlying problems as they jostle for Robert Lewandowski's signature, while Romelu Lukaku's back in Italy for more Intertainment. There's also a rundown of impressive Premier League additions, as Sven Botman joins Newcastle and Leeds snag the impressive Marc Roca.

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There’s no point in typing “it’s been a week” anymore because every week is A Week. But as we continue into a crumbling democracy, the growing sense of hopelessness is hard to ignore.

The fall is going to be brutal for schools and libraries across the country. We know this, given how last school year went and how the summer has turned into an opportunity for right-wing groups to protest and intimidate those showing up to library Drag Queen story times and those stealing or complaining about Pride displays. This summer is ample opportunity for these groups to recalibrate and set into motion their plans to implement book rating systems they’ve personally developed, which will inevitable trigger more book bans. Given the overturn of Roe this week, there is little doubt books about abortion or pregnancy will be getting the same treatment as those by and about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks, too.

While “go vote” continues to be a rallying cry about stopping this — and it certainly does matter — there are other avenues for creating change, too. There’s running for school board, seeking appointment or election onto a library board, and there’s showing up to those meetings (in person/virtual or via email/letter writing). One of the easiest? Become an election judge. This may be called something slightly different where you’re at, but it is the person who sits at an election site and ensures everyone is able to vote.

Every state operates a little differently, but every state requires a number of volunteers to work the polls for elections. You can do this during early voting periods or on election day, depending on your schedule and the needs of your community. Again, depending on needs, these can be long days, but you may be paid for that time.

Sitting as a poll worker helps ensure everyone who is able and registered to vote is given the same opportunity to do just that. In some places, you may help register those showing up that day. The typical day involves setting up voting booths, ensuring that all materials are accessible and working, and helping every person who walks in to vote knows the process and procedure. It also involves making sure that everyone follows the rules of the election: no electioneering at the election site, no advertisements for politicians or ballot measures within a certain distance of the door, ensuring that no one influences the outcome of any vote throughout the day. You may also have to help direct individuals to their appropriate polling place (though hopefully more communities will go the route of DuPage County, wherein residents can go to any polling location to cast their vote).

We at Book Riot like a social media trend just as much as anyone, especially when we can find a bookish slant. You might’ve seen this latest viral formula when it first appeared on TikTok as a rating game. Or perhaps you, like this elder millennial, caught on when it made its way to Twitter.

The basic formula is that you say someone is “a 10 but” and then follow it with some sort of dealbreaker. At first it was just friends posing fictional scenarios for each other to respond to. I might post “she’s a 10 but she pronounces the l in salmon.” Then my friends could respond with her new rating based on that quirk. (She’s a 3. If you pronounce that l, we can’t talk. I am working on unpacking oppressive linguistic biases, but I can’t get over that one.)

Then, it grew to be sort of a self-deprecating thing — TikTokers pointing out their low-stakes toxic traits. As an example:

While they’re often silly things, some include some real red flags. For example, one of my fellow Rioters suggested this bookish gem: He’s a 10 but his bookshelves only have Ayn Rand.

We may be past pride month, but as we all know, reading books with LGBTQ+ rep should be an all-year-round affair. Especially when it comes to dark fantasy. Especially when those books are sapphic.

Why are sapphic fantasy novels so important? Traditionally speaking, sci-fi and fantasy genres have long been dominated by straight men’s voices. Which is… fine. But it’s empowering and exciting to see that in our contemporary literary culture, we’re starting to expand a little more in representation. There is a wide range of highly inventive, beautifully rendered, and yes, super dark fantasy worlds in which women’s stories are centered.

For me personally, I love to see women setting off on their own adventures in fantasy scenarios. And dark fantasy is especially satisfying because it gives women characters the space to act in morally questionable ways and do surprising things.

Here are 1- fantastic sapphic fantasy novels — some adult and YA. Fair warning: you’re going to want to pick up as soon as you finish checking out this list. Your TBR pile might never recover.

One of the best things about reading nonfiction is that it reminds me just how big and weird this world we live in is. I read a lot of nonfiction that tackles big ideas about language, history, current affairs, and identity. But I’ve recently come to love another kind of nonfiction — books that explore the ordinary. I love nonfiction that takes something I know nothing about, and, in many cases, something I’ve never even considered, and makes me care about it. How often do you think about how clocks work? Have you ever pondered the important role rain has played in human history? How much do you know about salt, iron, fig trees, stone walls, cameras?

I will never be an expert in any of the subjects these books explore. That’s part of what makes these books so interesting — they let me into their secret worlds and change the way I think about things I encounter every day. They remind me of what’s so wonderful about being a human: that we share the world with so many incredible creatures, places, and materials, and that sometimes, we make pretty cool things, too.

Many of the books on this list are pure fun. Some of them tackle big themes — race, culture, colonization, environmental destruction, the history of science. But all of them hone in on the specific. I guarantee that every one of them will teach you something new that will totally blow your mind.