Brendan Bernhard

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The Ouija Poet

Brendan Bernhard
Through no fault of his own, the poet James Merrill (1926--1995) was separated from the ordinary run of humanity in three ways: He was extremely rich (his father was a founder of the brokerage firm Merrill-Lynch), he was gay and he was a genius. Not many people are dealt such......
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Interview With a . . . Novelist

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Jillian Edelstein A very smooth customer, Julian Barnes. If his erstwhile friend Martin Amis is cool, then the author of Metroland, Flaubert’s Parrot and England, England, among other titles, seems just a little cold. Tall and chalkily pale, with a vampiric incisor slipping over his lower lip, he......
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To the Finland Station

Brendan Bernhard
Richard Rayner, who began his writing life as a journalist at Time Out in London and still works as one on a freelance basis, has one of the odder literary careers going. Five books into it, it’s still difficult to tell exactly what kind of writer he is. His first......
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The Insulted and the Injured

Brendan Bernhard
British novelist Rupert Thomson was in L.A. the other week, staying (courtesy of his publisher) at the swank Regent Beverly-Wilshire Hotel. I met him poolside in the middle of the afternoon. Tall and very thin, with spiky gray hair and ascetic features, the 45-year-old author of Air & Fire, The......
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The Liar Inside Him

Brendan Bernhard
In The Mustache, one of the more disquieting novels of the 1980s, French novelist Emmanuel Carrere told the story of an unnamed Parisian yuppie who one day decides to shave off his mustache and then slowly goes insane when everyone, including his wife, denies that he ever had one. At......

The Transhumanists

Brendan Bernhard
Photos by Anne Fishbein IN THE FUTURE, MARTIN AMIS HAS WRITTEN, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes -- but only inside their own heads. Listening to the self-proclaimed "transhumanist" and "extropic" artist Natasha Vita-More, I am inclined to say that the future has arrived. But that can't be right......
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Bellow the Belt

Brendan Bernhard
Photo courtesy Maggie Glotzer Saul Bellow, one of two living Americans to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (the other is Toni Morrison), hardly lacks for recognition. He once complained that he had won so many medals he felt like a Russian general. But Bellow, James Atlas’ sharply critical......
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Do the Clothes Make the Man?

Brendan Bernhard
Looking like the broker from another planet, Thomas Frank stood on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue in a pinstripe suit, a crisp white shirt and gleaming black lace-ups that would have looked just right on the feet of your father‘s father at 9 o’clock in the morning......
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J’Accuse!

Brendan Bernhard
At this point in history, it‘s hard to term anyhing so old-fashioned as a novel ”shocking.“ What a novel can still be, though, is annoying -- and, given the ruckus it has raised in Europe, French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles would appear to be just that. Less a......

Parlor Games

Brendan Bernhard
Director Tonie Marshall on love, boring explanations and Venus Beauty Institute At a time when so many French films are set in factories, dying school systems and industrial wastelands populated by unemployed grousers with sneers and cigarettes glued to their lips, Tonie Marshall‘s Venus Beauty Institute comes as something of......