In this issue...

An Occasional Hobo
by Robert Ito
Josiah Flynt Willard’s incurable “go-fever” took him from jail cells to boxcars to the tables of Ibsen and Tolstoy.

FULL TEXT
In the Atomic City
by Millicent G. Dillon
More than a half century later, an account of one junior physicist’s coming-of-age in a secret nuclear facility.

The Forefather of Charm
by Charity Vogel
“The Genuine Fakir of Ava,” nineteenth-century America’s most famous magician, was also the godfather of the modern game show.

People Floating Near You
by Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman
Offering insight into such human experiences as feeling not at all responsible while actually being completely responsible

FULL TEXT
Joe Sacco [COMICS JOURNALIST]
interviewed by Hillary Chute

Lena Herzog [PHOTOGRAPHER]
interviewed by Lawrence Weschler

Jesse Ball [NOVELIST, POET]
interviewed by Jesse Ball

Dan Harmon [TELEVISION WRITER]
interviewed by Toph Eggers

Peter Galison [FILMMAKER]
micro-interviewed by Benjamin Cohen

The Process
A conversation with artist Dorian FitzGerald about his painting Table Decorations, Oprah Winfrey Party for Sidney Poitier.
by Sheila Heti

FULL TEXT
“Coming out of me living”
by W. H. Auden reviewed by Annie Julia Wyman

Dr. Seuss’ Fox in Socks reviewed by Stephen Burt

Destroyer’s Kaputt reviewed by Brandon Stosuy

The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan reviewed by Megan Pugh

FULL TEXT
TAGLINE: No Strings Attached reviewed by Tag Savage

Orange on the Nail
a new poem by Natalie Shapero

What the Swedes Read
by Daniel Handler
A monthly column

FULL TEXT
Sedaratives
with guest columnist
Adam Mansbach

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

Schema: A Family Tree
of Literary Detectives by Doogie Horner

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

... and more.

Contributors to this issue

SPONSORS
Harper Perennial
SF MoMA
Voice of Witness
Bookforum

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The Believer

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
THE RACE THAT IS NOT ABOUT WINNING
We Need a Certain Kind of Teenage Antihero to Remind Us That We Are Not Alone.
by Mark Oppenheimer

FULL TEXT
DAVID WAIN
interviewed by Toph Eggers
“Often people would be like, I’m such a big fan of your work. I think you’re amazing. I want to have a career like yours. And I’m like, Great, can you buy me a slice of pizza?”

Editors’ Shortlists
The Believer Book Award
The Believer Poetry Award

THE FILM ISSUE
People on Sunday:
A Film Without Actors
an introduction by Jessica Winter to the included DVD

Also in this issue

The Dreams of a Creative Begetter by David Cairns

Virginia Mountain Scream Queen: My Life in B Movies by Rebecca Taylor

The Factory Model of Desire: Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner Moved to L.A. and Forever Changed Sex, Death, and Boredom in America. by Peter Lunenfeld

A Deck of Cards and a Golden Whistle by Bess Lovejoy

Reductions: A Condensed Survey of the Digest Film by Thomas Beard

The Gestures of Robert Mitchum by Michael Atkinson

THREE NEW POEMS
“Burning Sage” by Dina Omar
“Kings” by Adam Zagajewski
“Oh, Wow, Mausoleums,” by Kathleen Ossip

Debra Winger interviewed by Vendela Vida

Walter Murch in conversation with David Thomson

Paul Verhoeven micro-interviewed by Jules Moore

Real Life Rock Top Tenby Greil Marcus

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby

Sedaratives with guest columnist Jerry Stahl

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

... and more.

Contributors to this issue

SPONSORS
Merge Records
ANTI Records
IFC Films
Chrome Industries

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The Believer

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
THE DEAD CHIPMUNK
An Interrogation Into the Mechanisms of Jokes
by CHRIS BACHELDER
I see now what happened. My daughter and I went to campus, and we became unwitting elements in the spontaneous generation of a joke. All of the requisite materials—protective father, inquisitive child, snacks, dead animal—were combined on a pleasant morning, and a joke was created.

FULL TEXT
GARY FRANCIONE interviewed by DEB OLIN UNFERTH
“An abolitionist regards creative, nonviolent vegan education as the primary form of activism, because she understands that the paradigm will not shift until we address demand and educate people to stop thinking of animals as things we eat, wear, or use as our resources.”

Also in this issue

So There’s This Man by T Cooper

Slaying the Chinese Jabberwock by Alan Levinovitz

Margaret and Christine Wertheim interviewed by Lawrence Weschler

S. T. Joshi micro-interviewed by Fritz Swanson

ONE-PAGE BOOK REVIEWS
Mark Doten on Lisa Dierbeck,
Blake Bronson-Bartlett on Thalia Field,
Stephen Burt on H. L. Hix,
Dalia Sofer on Sadegh Hedayat,
Meehan Crist on Dara Greenwald & Josh MacPhee,
and Emily Cooke on Eileen Myles.

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby

Sedaratives with guest columnist Paul Scheer

Le Loup Garou Déconstruit and
Double Dutch Me, Hippocrates:
two new poems by Jeannette Allée

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

... and more.

Contributors to this issue

SPONSORS
Harper Perennial    •    Tin House Books    •    Drawn & Quarterly    •    Third Man Records

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Do your homework by reading an excerpt from the memoir in the January issue of the Believer!

powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Please RSVP: rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
INTERNACIONALISTA
The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
by Deb Olin Unferth
In El Salvador there hadn’t been anyone like me and George. We’d been alone, going around on the streets. In Nicaragua there were hundreds of us, thousands, so many we had a special name: we were called Internacionalistas, and we came from all over the world—Europe, Africa, all the Americas. We had professors and scientists among our ranks, and farmers and newspapermen and a brigade of artists, all trooping around.

FULL TEXT
Pharoahe Monch interviewed by Adam Mansbach
“There’s a whole other side of it that can coax you to have more discipline and open you up to a different way of being and a different lifestyle, and those things don’t get focused on any more. Speaking for myself, Chuck D had me like, ‘Whoo!’, fucking stressing about ‘Let me go look [his references] up; who are these people?’”

The Crying of Page 45
How will a page without limits change the way we tell stories?
by Reif Larsen

The Depthless Bookshelf
Selling the Uncomplicated Ease of Virtual Reading
by Theo Schell-Lambert

Conscientious Clothing
Visions of Artisanal Underwear by Andy Selsberg

Leïla Marouane reviewed by M. Lynx Qualey

Bette Pesetsky reviewed by Justin Taylor

Molly Bendall reviewed by Stephen Burt

Timothy Donnelly reviewed by David Gorin

The Beowulf Manuscript (Edited and Translated by R. D. Fulk) reviewed by Colin Fleming

Bianca Casady interviewed by Ross Simonini

Guy Maddin interviewed by Ryan Boudinot

John Ehle in conversation with
Michael Ondaatje, Linda Spalding, Leon Rooke

Thalia Field micro-interviewed by John Madera

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby

Sedaratives with guest columnist Scott Thompson

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

... and more.

Contributors to this issue

SPONSORS
Harper Perennial    •    Merge Records    •    Granta

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In this issue...

FULL TEXT
Declaration on the Notion of “The Future”
The International Necronautical Society

FULL TEXT
Michael Light in conversation with Lawrence Weschler
“I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West—recur- rent themes in my overall work—I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.”

Creatures of Other Mould by Avi Davis

Safe As Houses by Karolina Waclawiak

John Baldessari interviewed by Eleanor Morgan

Clare Rojas interviewed by Natasha Boas

Vile Bodies by Ed Lin

The Ghost Who Refused to Die by C. S. Leigh

Altoon’s Bloom by Alex Kitnick

Fictions of the Pose: A Letter from Harry Berger Jr. solicited by Lawrence Weschler

The Center of the Construction: How to Enter a Carroll Dunham Drawing by David Humphrey

Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies At 91 a new poem by L. S. Klatt

Keegan McHargue interviewed by Ross Simonini

Ragnar Kjartansson micro-interviewed by Scott Indrisek

Sedaratives with guest columnist Mike Doughty

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

... and more.

Contributors to this issue

SPONSORS
Harper Perennial    •    Merge Records    •    Bookforum    •    AMMO Books

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In this issue...

FULL TEXT
The End of the Story
by Zach Baron
How a thirtysomething former Mormon missionary ended up writing the conclusion to the most popular fantasy series since Tolkien.

The Birth of Autumnal Folk
by David K. O'Hara
In the early 1970s, British pop suddenly sounded like the dawn breaking—intermittent birdsong and all.

Answers from the Dark
by Adrian Van Young
Spiritualism has moved beyond its glory days of William James and P. T. Barnum, and settled down in a nice town in eastern New York.

Light is the Shape Whose Source We Perceive
by Ashley Butler
Chemical warfare, anti-dimming paste, and the development of the modern gas mask.

Travels With My Ex
by Susan Straight
Navigating gridlock and prejudice in the Inland Empire.

FULL TEXT
Marianne Constable interviewed by Jill Stauffer
This legal philosopher studies the relationship of speech and silence to law. Also: what does that have to do with justice?

David Fincher in conversation with Mark Romanek
Two commercial directors with roots in music videos discuss the psychic demands and buried pleasures of creating and controlling their films.

Barry Hannah in conversation with Wells Tower
"I was kind of brokenhearted that I was called difficult. I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience."

John Currence
micro-interviewed by Jack Pendarvis

Exit Signs Shine Brighter at Night
a new poem by Alan Gilbert

Wife’s Job at the Perpetual Alps Factory
a new poem by Sandra Simonds

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
reviewed by Rozalia Jovanovic

FULL TEXT
Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat & Other Poems
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Mary Rechner’s Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
reviewed by Malena Watrous

Atsuro Riley’s Romey’s Order
reviewed by Dominic Luxford

FULL TEXT
Matt Bell’s How They Were Found
reviewed by Reese Okyong Kwon

FULL TEXT
Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

Sedaratives
with guest columnist Rich Fulcher

Creative Accounting: This American Life Episode #388
by M. Rebekah Otto

Schema: Drinking Games from Around the World
by Jude Stewart

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

SPONSORS
ANTI-
Harper Perennial
Chronicle Books

Contributors to this issue

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The Believer, front and center.

Published by Chronicle Books, THE MARVELOUS MUSEUM will be available for the first time at the opening (details below). Lawrence Weschler (who interviewed Dion for the book) will be in town participating in a Q&A at the museum.

Information on both events is below. Please come, and please help spread the word!

MARK DION AT THE OAKLAND MUSEUM
Friday, September 10
5:00 - 7:30 p.m.

Opening party for The Marvelous Museum: A Project by Mark Dion, the new exhibition in the Art Gallery. Features an archival silent film screening with live musical accompaniment by "The Marvelous Museum Band" (10 p.m.)

More info »
Facebook event page »

MARK DION IN CONVERSATION WITH LAWRENCE WESCHLER
Saturday, September 11
2 p.m.

Mark Dion and Lawrence Weschler discuss wonder and its role in the future of museums with René de Guzman, senior curator of art. Weschler directs the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and is the author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995), Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), and Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (2008), among other books. A book signing with Mark Dion and Lawrence Weschler will follow.

More info »
Facebook event page »

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
Sweatpants in Paradise
by Molly Young
The Exciting World of Immersive Retail

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Sedaratives
with guest columnist Brendon Small

Cameras Are Clocks for Seeing
by Geoff Dyer
Roland Barthes's 1980 Camera Lucida reads as a discursive novel (written by a mother-mourning French theorist) presciently preoccupied with photography as a technology of the past.

From "Love, An Index": a new poem
Rebecca Lindenburg

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

For the Love of Pretty Things
by Robert R. Johnson
The Radium Girls and "dying for science."

"Fata Morgana": a new poem
by Yusef Komunyakaa

One-Page Reviews
Andrew Ervin on Anne Carson,
Victor Brand on Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud,
Kate Zambreno on Danielle Dutton,
Megan Doll on Kira Henehan,
Mark Edmund Doten on Eugene Marten, and
Stephen Burt on Melissa Range

The Culture of Calamity
by Anne Gisleson
A view from over the shoulders of the press corps in a Coast Guard plane flying above the Gulf of Mexico.

Man of the Century
by Damion Searls
Just in time for its author's hundredth birthday, the remarkably sympathetic fiction of Hans Keilson—doctor in the Dutch resistance, psychologist of trauma, and erstwhile novelist—is finally available in English.

Bohemian Rhapsody
by Jason Boog
During one hot summer in 1934, a love affair transformed a scrappy band of self-published poets into the biggest literary celebrities in the country.

"Weird Al" Yankovic interviewed by Jonathan Zwickel
"I sort of feel like I'm at work when I'm listening to a Top 40 radio station."

FULL TEXT
Robin Nagle interviewed by Alex Carp
As an anthropologist, Nagle trained in fieldwork and the tools of social science; as a sanitation worker, she had a route in the Bronx.

Wallace Shawn interviewed by Duncan Macmillan
"I've always been interested in how to get people to not walk into a theater and immediately fall into a state of sleep."

Simone Muench microinterviewed by Daniel Handler

Schema: Schema: Great Sandwiches in Literature
by Yeonjae Yuk

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

SPONSORS
Harper Perennial
Merge Records
Chronicle Books

Contributors to this issue

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The Believer, front and center.

In this issue...

The 2010 Believer Music Issue CD
We Bumped Our Heads Against the Clouds
by Chuck Lightning

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
by Joe Hagan
The Secret Diary of Nina Simone

FULL TEXT
Orientalist Party Music
by Saki Knafo
In the early 1960s, America began devouring Arabic rock-and-roll records made by Middle Eastern guys living in Brooklyn.

M.I.A.
interviewed by Joshua Clover

Vinyl Cut Pro
by Adam Kempa
Being a primer on oddly grooved records

Robert Forster
interviewed by Robert Christgau
and Carola Dibbell

Grokking Rush
by Skylaire Alfvegren

FULL TEXT
Lady Saw
interviewed by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

The Gospel of the Drum Machine
by Rick Moody

FULL TEXT
Tammy Wynette’s “Woman to Woman”
by Ken Tucker
The Hard-Boiled Feminist Manifesto You’ve Never Heard.

The Six Saddest TV Theme Songs of the ’70s
by Kailyn McCord
The shows themselves weren’t actually that sad.

Warp Records and the Birth of
Popular Electronic Music
moderated by Erik Morse

Cage: a new poem
by Sara Michas-Martin

Found Poem: Prisoners of War Postcard: 28-11-1914, Ahmednagar, India
by Tess Taylor

Schwinn: a new poem
by Matthew Zapruder

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

Sedaratives
guest columnist Laraine Newman

Schema: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
by Ben Greenman

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

SPONSORS
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Harper Perennial
826 National
Converse
Merge Records

Contributors to this issue

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

Subscribe to the Believer!

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The Believer, front and center.

SATURDAY, JUNE 26
6-8 P.M.
AMNESIA THE BAR
853 Valencia Street
SAN FRANCISCO
TOTALLY FREE

featuring: Elif Batuman, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Damion Searls, and Justin Taylor. Plus an all-acoustic solo set of summer-scented cover-songs from Ezra Feinberg of Citay!

The flier is on Facebook: here

In this issue...

The Last Stand of Free Town
by Porter Fox
What made one of the longest-lasting social experiments in modern history fall apart?

FULL TEXT
Two Poets
by Robert Hass
A lively new generation of poets in China is trying to find its way through, and around, the ideology of the past.

Blacked Out
by Michael G. Powell
The black marks covering government documents have a rich history, from FOIA and Man Ray to George W. Bush and Jenny Holzer.

Laughing a Lot, and Often Over Nothing Much
by Elizabeth Gumport
The screwball heroism of Elaine Dundy, chick-lit’s brilliantly angry and funny stepmother.

Phoebe Gloeckner
interviewed by Hillary Chute
The former medical illustrator has spent her career producing formally experimental work on the lives of young women.

David Shields
in conversation with Sarah Manguso
Two epigrammatic and genre-melting writers discuss the narrative gene, the best “white-space books” of all time, and self-karaoke.

FULL TEXT
Michael Silverblatt
interviewed by Sarah Fay
This radio host weeps during interviews, knows his abstract math, and threw away his stuffed animals because Susan Sontag told him to.

Three poems by Yu Jian
translated from the Chinese by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett

Three sections from Misfortune by Xi Chuan
translated from the Chinese by Wang Ping and Alex Lemon

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

FULL TEXT
Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star
reviewed by Gary Lutz

FULL TEXT
Karen Weiser’s To Light Out
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Joshua Cohen’s Witz
reviewed by Blake Butler

Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver
reviewed by Theodore McDermott

Sedaratives
by Rose McGowan

Schema: Our Nation’s Poets Laureate
by Moze Halperin

SPONSORS
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Harper Perennial
826 National
Converse
Merge Records

Contributors to this issue

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The Believer, front and center.

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
The Death of a Civil Servant
by Lev Grossman
Two of the twentieth century’s dominant literary traditions—modernism and fantasy—met as mismatched roommates in colonial Ceylon.

Ninjas I Have Known
by Stephen Phelan
It’s impossible to say with certainty that you’re not being stalked by a ninja right now. Also: that ninja may be Scottish.

A Sunburst Above a Receding Road
by Namwali Serpell
What happens when, pronouncing the names of Nabokov’s characters, they leave the page and end up in your mouth?

A Glimpse of Unplumbed Depths
by Annie Julia Wyman
What is the goal of Erich Auerbach’s monumental, doomed scholarship? Simply put, to better understand what it means to be alive.

Maureen Howard
in conversation with Joanna Scott
“The author may be absent from the work, but she’s left her dirty fingerprints all over the pages.”

Daniel Clowes
interviewed by Nicole Rudick
The cartoonist-genius responsible for Ghost World describes his start at Cracked magazine and his Peanuts-like new book.

FULL TEXT
Lawrence Schiller
interviewed by Suzanne Snider
First Schiller bought Gary Gilmore’s life rights and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. Then he hired Norman Mailer.

Bryan Garner
micro-interviewed by Josh Fischel
Is the Constitution a well-written document?

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

FULL TEXT
The Believer Book Award
by the Editors

FULL TEXT
The Reader Survey

Creative Accounting: Performance and Installation
by M. Rebekah Otto

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

FULL TEXT
Charlie Smith’s Three Delays
reviewed by Rick Moody

FULL TEXT
James Schuyler’s Other Flowers
reviewed by Daniel Handler

David Baker’s Never-Ending Birds
reviewed by Stephen Burt

Nin Andrews’s Southern Comfort
reviewed by Ken Tucker

Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum Of Eterna’s Novel
reviewed by Jessica Loudis

Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth
reviewed by M. Lynx Qualey

The Deer Path: A new poem
by Kathleen Ossip

Sedaratives
by Todd Hanson

Schema: Impossible Colors
by Jude Stewart

SPONSORS
Converse
Harper Perennial
Vintage Anchor Books

Contributors to this issue

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The Believer, front and center.

We also congratulate Blake Bailey, who won the NBCC’s biography award for Cheever: A Life, an excerpt of which (“John Cheever on the Rocks”) appeared in our June 2008 issue; and Rae Armantrout, who won the poetry award for her collection Versed, and whose poems have appeared in our February 2009 and January 2010 issues.

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
Watching Shrek in Tehran
by Brian T. Edwards
The seen and the unseen in Iranian cinema.

Buddy Ebsen
by Hilton Als
Manhattan piers, Ballet Review, Justin Bond, and other paths through queer culture.

The Apocalypse Will Be Televised
by Mark Holcomb
British television writer Nigel Kneale never met a cultural totem or TV trope he couldn’t reduce to rubble.

Black Notes
by Graham T. Beck
The story of a former boxer from Pennsylvania’s coal country who can kill you—and bring you back to life—merely by touching you in the right place.

Bonus Disc Fever
by Alex Rose
Supplementary culture and the paradox of accessibility.

The Healing Machine
by Mike Plante
DIY filmmaker Brent Green builds an actual town in service of love and a bizarre form of therapy.

Projections
by Leyla Ertegun
Sitting in the dark, next to a man, escaping into pictures.

FULL TEXT
Charlyne Yi
interviewed by Sheila Heti
“Hey guys, I’m wearing a sweater. What’s going on?”

Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
interviewed by Peter Orner
“I always found a certain irony in this idea of men trying to figure out how to nurse lambs.”

Harmony Korine
interviewed by Ross Simonini
“Child acrobats, people who can set themselves on fire—that’s always what kept me going. Goldfish swallowers, pygmies—to me, that’s the greatest thing in life.”

Gary Hustwit
micro-interviewed by Melissa Goldstein

Cinema, Happiness: Six Short Films by Karpo Godina
edited and arranged by Jacob Perlin
introduced by Jurij Meden
Notes on the DVD of short films included with the print issue.

Creative Accounting: Independent Feature Film
by M. Rebekah Otto

Whatever Surrogate: A new poem
by Albert Goldbarth

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

FULL TEXT
The Believer Book Award: Editors’ Shortlist

Austerity Program
by David Khoury and Tucker Nichols

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

Missed Encounters with the Movies
by Elif Batuman
Seven unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals.

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Teamwork Should Come From the Soul: A new poem
by Heather Christle

Sedaratives
by Julie Klausner

Schema: Classic Movie Tie-Ins
by Steve Seid

SPONSORS
Converse
Harper Perennial
Vintage Anchor Books

Contributors to this issue

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

Subscribe to the Believer!

Follow the Believer on Twitter!

The Believer, front and center.

The cover depicts, clockwise from the upper left,
Gabriel García Márquez, Manly P. Hall, Trent Reznor, and Noy Holland.
Cover illustrations: Charles Burns!

In this issue...

FULL TEXT
Going to the Tigers
by Robert Cohen
Might some new style be necessary, one that’s neither “plain” nor “lyrical” but dissolves the line between all such easy polarities?

García Márquez Goes to the Dentist
by Julio Villanueva Chang
As John Cheever once said, a story is “what you tell yourself in a dentist’s office while you’re waiting for an appointment.”

What You Can’t Learn Collecting Esoteric Books
by Andrea Richards
Uncle Vernie’s forgotten library reveals deep riches from the fringes of intellectual history, including several “harsh and gnarly cleanses.”

The Bountiful Continent
by Casey Walker
Is William T. Vollmann’s study of the Imperial Valley his Moby-Dick? Or is it a 1,300-page letter to a woman who broke his heart?

Becoming a Lady
by Amelie Gillette
The time-honored tradition of transforming girls into self-confident, slightly more polite, definitely less-drunk young women.

FULL TEXT
A Roundtable Discussion with Daniel Alarcón, Eduardo Halfon, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Three prizewinning Latino novelists living in the U.S. discuss the implications of writing in Spanish, English, and elsewhere.

Trent Reznor
interviewed by Brandon Bussolini
How eighteen years in the cornfields of rural Pennsylvania with nothing but AM/FM radio created Nine Inch Nails.

Stanley Crawford in correspondence with Noy Holland
An epistolary conversation between two great writers who grow things: she plants bulbs, he harvests 500 pounds of garlic a year.

Sarah Waters
micro-interviewed by Peter Terzian
A celebrated historical novelist has just published her first work without lesbian characters. The new book features ghosts.

No Opera: A new poem
by Derek Walcott

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

Sedaratives
by Bob Saget

American Gothic: A new poem
by Virginia Konchan

FULL TEXT
Best European Fiction 2010
reviewed by Miranda F. Mellis

Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed
reviewed by Scott Indrisek

FULL TEXT
Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming
reviewed by Don Waters

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask
reviewed by Andrew Ervin

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay
reviewed by Meehan Crist

“Comics”
by Alvin Buenaventura

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Schema: Nine Famous Hypochondriacs
by Brian Dillon

SPONSORS
Princeton Architectural Press
Harper Perennial
Le Tourment Vert

Contributors to this issue

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The cover depicts, clockwise from the upper left,
a Japanese tengu monster, Ruth Reichl, Francis Ford Coppola,
and Alex Whybrow, a.k.a. professional wrestler Sweet ’n’ Sour Larry Sweeney.
Cover illustration: Charles Burns!

In this issue...

What Happens There
by John D’Agata
A chronicle of suicide, longing, silence, and what’s not announced by the epic signage of Las Vegas.

Speak, Memorates
by Robert Ito
Were the ghosts and demons described in a Japanese folklore classic real? And why is nearly everyone in the stories so very mean?

FULL TEXT
Toward a Theory of Surprise
by Chris Bachelder
In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise.

Fridays at Enrico’s
by Sarah Weinman
Don Carpenter, author of one of the best prison novels of all time, and a superlative Hollywood novel, is finally back in the spotlight.

Catharsis in Bebop
by John Domini
How does the innovative fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino experiment with form and still keep readers’ passions engaged?

FULL TEXT
Aleksandar Hemon
in conversation with Colum McCann
Two brilliant novelists (one Bosnian, the other Irish) discuss the communities (real and imagined) that drive their work.

Francis Ford Coppola
in conversation with Ruth Reichl
Coppola tells Reichl about the place of food in his life, his films, his family, and what he cooked the night before last.

Alex Whybrow
interviewed by Andrew Simmons
The ways in which the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson complement the career of a professional wrestler.

Eileen Luhr
micro-interviewed by Nick Poppy
How Christian rock colonized (and was colonized by) secular culture.

From “Hide and Seek”: Three new poems
by Dan Chiasson

Second Person: A new poem
by Rae Armantrout

Sedaratives
by Liam Lynch

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

FULL TEXT
Momus’s The Book of Jokes
reviewed by Justin Taylor

FULL TEXT
Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Three
reviewed by Megan Doll

Lynn Sukenick’s Houdini
reviewed by Meehan Crist

Kiki Petrosino’s Fort Red Border
reviewed by David Gorin

“Comics”
by Alvin Buenaventura

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis

Schema: Color Sayings from Around the Globe
by Jude Stewart

SPONSORS
Merge Records
Harper Perennial
Beggars Group and Matador Records

Contributors to this issue

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

Subscribe to the Believer!

Follow the Believer on Twitter!

The Believer, front and center.

We don’t think there’s ever been a better time to subscribe, either: the January 2010 issue features conversations with Ruth Reichl, Francis Ford Coppola, Aleksandar Hemon, and recent National Book Award-winner Colum McCann.

To get the half-year gift sub, all you have to do is enter the second shipping address in the comments section during checkout — but it’s only available until Monday (December 7, 2009). Click here to get started!