The cover depicts, clockwise from the top left,
good David Cross, hateful David Cross,
Elizabeth Hardwick, and Julie Hecht.
Cover illustrations: Charles Burns!

In this issue...

Menacing Earthworks
by Alexander Provan
Where does our ingrained fear of everything nuclear come from? And how does it affect the way we store our radioactive waste?

Poison
by Sarah Manguso
All autoimmune diseases invoke the metaphor of suicide. The body destroys itself from the inside.

The Moon Over the Gate
by Per Petterson
Why do some people go to the desert to erase themselves?

FULL TEXT
“An Original Adventure”
by Lisa Levy
Elizabeth Hardwick eluded domesticity and became a pioneer of New York women intellectuals.

FULL TEXT
Richard Price
interviewed by Alec Michod
“All good dialogue is funny.”

David Cross
interviewed by Adam Bulger and Eric Spitznagel
A double interview in which, in the spirit of doing something different, the comedian requests two interviews, one with someone who loves him, and one with someone who hates him.

Julie Hecht
interviewed by Andrew Nellins
How publishing is a pigsty, culture is declining, and the Christian Broadcasting Network gets it right.

Liso: An Oral History
edited by Peter Orner
A South African Christian legally brought to America to work illegally struggles to get home.

FULL TEXT
The 2007 Believer Book Awards
Including the editors’ short list and citations from Eileen Myles, Dean Young, Rivka Galchen, John Haskell, and others.

Sedaratives
by Mindy Kaling

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

FULL TEXT
Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Nadine Gordimer’s Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
reviewed by Adam Novy

Jason Brown’s Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work
reviewed by Nina MacLaughlin

FULL TEXT
Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute
reviewed by Laird Hunt

Aaron Fagan’s Garage
reviewed by Idra Novey

Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff
reviewed by Suzanne Kleid

Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles
reviewed by David Stromberg

Old Mosquito & Mother’s Pianos: two new poems
by Ilya Kaminsky

Things to Do on a Rainy Day: a new poem
by Mary Ruefle

Fable: a new poem
by Dean Young

Schema: The Four Quadrants of the Apocalypse
by Jesse Nathan

SPONSORS
Merge Records
Harper Perennial
and the following Grove Atlantic titles:
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Contributors to this issue

Buy a copy of this issue from the McSweeney’s Store!

Subscribe to the Believer!

The Believer, front and center.

Hosted by Todd Barry, the night will include music from John Wesley Harding, a panel discussion, moderated by Morgan Meis, with Scandinavian authors Halfdan Freihow, Christian Jungersen, Jo Nesbø, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir, and a live interactive ViewMaster performance by Vladimir.

The event is free and open to the public. Click here for more info.

Benjamin Weissman will interview Korine after the screening. A reception will follow.

This event is at the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Doors are at 6:30 p.m., show at 7:30. Please RSVP via email. (Attendance is on a first-come, first-served basis. RSVPing is required but does not guarantee entry.)

RIP Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, 1938-2008.

The cover depicts, counterclockwise from the top, Slavoj Žižek,
Anna Karina, Errol Morris, birds from The Birds (1963), a View-Master,
Eugene Pallette, a copy of Variety from 1958, and Tippi Hedren.

In this issue...

Anna Karina and the American Night
by Michael Atkinson
Establishing shots, slow dissolves, and other small particulars may be what we remember—and love—most about the movies.

FULL TEXT
On the Road
by Chuck Klosterman
In road movies, we’re either going somewhere slow or nowhere fast.

Humor Doesn’t Translate Internationally
by Rolf Potts
Classic B movies were campy and self-conscious. To sell in global markets, the cheap knockoff films of today must be resolutely self-serious.

The Vanishing and American Sociopathy
by Jim Shepard
Understanding America’s murderous foreign policy by way of a late-’80s killer-next-door Dutch buddy-thriller.

Todd Haynes
interviewed by Robert Polito
First the director utilizes genre, then he pries it open.

FULL TEXT
Werner Herzog
in conversation with Errol Morris
“If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.”

Vladimir
interviewed by Ross Simonini
On using the View-Master—that old binocular and paper disk toy—to make movie experiences that are a little like synchronized swimming.

Notes on The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
by Jason McBride
A DVD of which film, directed by Sophie Fiennes, is included with the print edition of this issue.

Sedaratives
by Larry Doyle

FULL TEXT
The Right Man
by Devin McKinney

Opera Jawa: The Discovery of a Secret Indonesian Musical Masterpiece
by R. Emmet Sweeney

Stuff I’ve Been Watching
by Nick Hornby

Players: A View Into the Paper Prisons That Cage Actors
by Helen DeWitt
The actual text of an actual contract read aloud by an actual player. In a diner.

The Hollywood Happy Meal
by Erik Lundegaard
Are the top ten best-selling films at the box office from fifty years ago more culturally nutritious than this week’s top ten? Let’s see.

Yeggs, Grifters, And Patsies: A ’30s Film Bestiary
by D. Cairns and B. Kite

Creative Accounting: Independent Feature Film
by Darren Franich

Schema: Schrader’s Secret Collection
by David Weisman

SPONSORS
IFC Films    |    CineVegas Film Festival    |    Vintage Books

Contributors to this issue

Buy a copy of this issue from the McSweeney’s Store!

Subscribe to the Believer!

The Believer, front and center.

The cover depicts, clockwise from the top left,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Suketu Mehta,
the young Karl Marx, and Mary Midgley.
Cover illustrations: Charles Burns!

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
No-Man’s-Land
by Eula Biss
Exposing the delusions and hostility of the American fear of “bad” neighborhoods, from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Chicago’s North Side.

The Violet Notebook
by Sam Stark
Before he began to read Hegel seriously, Marx produced a ridiculous and chaotic literary experiment for his father’s birthday.

The Chaos Machine
by Charles Baxter and Daniel Baxter
What, past the conception stage, do fathers actually do? How should they behave?

A Cloud in Pants
by Michael Almereyda
More than seventy-five years after his death, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry—and his life—still retain their uproariousness, influence, and tenderness.

Ryan McGinley
interviewed by Dana Spiotta
“Skateboarding is a lot like photography because skateboarding is about making something out of nothing.”

Don Hertzfeldt
interviewed by Mike Plante
Hertzfeldt doesn’t use a studio, producers, or computers for his animations, which take him years to create and are populated with stick figures.

Mary Midgley
interviewed by Sheila Heti
The formidable British moral philosopher on the ideology that comes boiling up out of books that get sold as science.

FULL TEXT
Suketu Mehta
interviewed by Karan Mahajan
The author of perhaps the greatest nonfiction book written about India reads Naipaul like a textbook.

FULL TEXT
Symbolism and Cynicism: On Being a Writer During Black History Month
by Tayari Jones
If February is Black History Month, is the rest of the calendar reserved for white people?

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

Imre Kertész’s Detective Story
reviewed by Andrew Ervin

FULL TEXT
Jasper Bernes’s Starsdown
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else
reviewed by Katherine Hill

Nathaniel Mackey’s Bass Cathedral
reviewed by Travis Nichols

Yannick Murphy’s In a Bear’s Eye
reviewed by Blake Butler

FULL TEXT
Don Waters’s Desert Gothic
reviewed by Nate Cavalieri

Sedaratives
by Andy Borowitz

Tool: Knight & Hale EZ-Grunt-Er Plus Deer Call
by Caitlin Van Dusen

Wolfspeak: a new poem
by Dean Young

Schema: There’s a Reason They’re Called Wills
by Nick Buttrick

SPONSORS
Knopf    |    Chronicle Books

Contributors to this issue

Buy a copy of this issue from the McSweeney’s Store!

Subscribe to the Believer!

The Believer, front and center.

From Nov. ’04: Miles Marshall Lewis in conversation with the late playwright August Wilson. “I always say that any painter that stands before a canvas is Picasso until proven otherwise.”

From Feb. ’05: Jonathan Lethem in conversation with Paul Auster. “There’s only one reader of a novel. That’s, I think, the crucial fact about all this. Only one person. Every time, only one person.”

From Apr. ’06: Brian J. Barr’s interview with Modest Mouse frontman and chef Isaac Brock. Recipes included. “How rad would it be to start a compost restaurant?”

From Sep. ’06: Paul La Farge delves into the continuing appeal of Dungeons & Dragons, and rolls with D&D creator Gary Gygax. “I wonder if the dungeons where most early adventures took place are fantasy versions of the basements of the Midwest?”

From Oct. ’03: Arthur C. Clarke and Lawrence Weschler discuss the intelligence of machines and the future of wonder. “It may well be that only in space, confronted with environments fiercer and more complex than any to be found upon this planet, will intelligence and creativity be able to reach their fullest potential.”

From Feb. ’06: Alec Wilkinson explores the tunnels underneath New York City. “A person might stand in Central Park on a certain piece of grass and reflect that many floors below his shoes is a room with the lights on.”

Also: Sets of thirty — nay, forty — Believer photo postcards by Brian McMullen can now be purchased for $7.00. If you’re the kind of person who writes holiday thank-you notes, you may enjoy writing them on these postcards. Click here to buy ’em.