Siri Hustvedt unmasked
Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World is a sparkling tour de force examining ideas about perception and identity. Harriet ‘Harry’ Burden, an artist railing against the New York art establishment that she believes has overlooked her work, undertakes a unique and complicated experiment: hiding behind the fronts of three male artists who exhibit her work as...
Mariano takes stock
There was no doubt when the Castro & Castro Industries shares skyrocketed on the Stock Market: the family had sold control of the company to the Bank of Massachusetts. The long transaction, involving much back and forth, dashed the hopes of many investors. Rumour had it that Castro Sr. broke down in tears and actually...
Landscape in winter
The times are turning bad again. I have been arrested for going to see a private art collection. Can you believe it? An old man of nearly eighty, a retired magistrate, is put in prison on suspicion. Instead of sitting on a dais giving judgment, here I am sitting on a stone floor waiting to...
Sheila Heti talks unpretty
Sheila Heti’s most recent novel How Should a Person Be? is a book that’s not afraid of appearing ugly, either aesthetically or morally. There is even a chapter called ‘Sheila Throws Her Shit’. Its writer, however, has a generous spirit, a sincere belief in the importance of art and that same mixture of confidence and...
Circus eroticus
It was afternoon. The hustle and bustle downtown masked the nervous coming and going of men in front of the old two-story house on Rua Primeiro de Março. On the façade of dusty drawn blinds, a plaque read ‘SECOND-HAND BOOKS – 2nd floor’. Beneath, in small letters, the line ‘Ring the bell’. The client obeyed...
