Brendan Bernhard

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Calamity of Excellence

Brendan Bernhard
He may be one of our leading magazine journalists - on staff at The New Yorker since 1981, a frequent contributor to Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly - but Lawrence Weschler is not very happy with the state of the art. In fact, he's horrified - and thinks we should......
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Monsieur Naturel

Brendan Bernhard
It’s a dirty job, and no one has to do it. It’s one o’clock on a rainy afternoon, and I’m standing on a bridge staring at the wet ramparts of a medieval village in the south of France, wondering what I’m doing here. Back in L.A., where this scheme was......
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Monsieur Naturel (page 2)

Brendan Bernhard
Up in the room I was renting from Gail Wagman, I'd been looking at the latest volume of Crumb's sketchbooks, and there was one drawing I kept going back to. It showed a black man in profile, wearing a baseball cap and drinking from a paper cup with the Dunkin'......

Among the Golems

Brendan Bernhard
Fez is the most daunting city in Morocco, its French-induced schizophrenia marked to an extreme degree. The old and new cities are two separate and contradictory worlds, each a riposte to the other. The new, French-built town is notable for its enormous tree-lined avenues, grand colonial statements that could only......
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Branded by Plath

Brendan Bernhard
Ted Hughes is the Prince Charles of modern poetry, the man who spurned the woman women love. (He is also poet laureate to the queen.) Birthday Letters, a long, sometimes rambling series of poems recounting his six-year marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath, puts him in a uniquely difficult......
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The Refugee

Brendan Bernhard
This story, originally published in the September 18, 1997, issue of L.A. Weekly, was reposted when R.B. Kitaj passed away October 21, 2007. Photo by Slobodan DimitrovThere are certain phrases that, once you've spent a few afternoons in the company of the painter R.B. Kitaj, rapidly become familiar. "I overstayed......
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Coming to America

Brendan Bernhard
This excerpt was originally published in L.A. Weekly on February 21, 1997, and reposted here on July 3, 2008. Early on the morning of September 30, 1973, in his home in Santa Monica Canyon, the 69-year-old English novelist Christopher Isherwood received a phone call from the Reuters news service informing......