Brendan Bernhard

Hollywood Satiricon

Brendan Bernhard
Photos by Debra DiPaolo Bruce Wagner nursed a large latte and studied The New York Times. As always, he was dressed in black, and two or three days’ dark stubble decorated his cheeks and prominent chin. His eyes, warm and brown like those of a highly intelligent dog, peered out......
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About a Book

Brendan Bernhard
"I was already friends with Dave and Vendela, yeah," said Nick Hornby, taking a drag off a Silk Cut in a hotel room high above Gramercy Park in New York City. I was asking him how he’d gotten hooked up with The Believer, the evangelizing literary magazine sponsored by Dave......
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The Coffee Table

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Edouard Boubat Perhaps we should begin our roundup of the season’s coffee-table books from a lordly, even astral height — this is, after all, a time of year much preoccupied with the heavens. We should begin, in other words, from the stunning perspective of outer space revealed in......

White Muslim

Brendan Bernhard
To read the first part of White Muslim click here. THE SYRIAN ISLAM-SPREADER The floor of the men’s room in the 96th Street mosque was awash in water. To the left of the entrance stood a huge basket of mismatched flip-flops and sandals, to be put on before going inside......

White Muslim

Brendan Bernhard
Photos by Neville Elder HOW TO BECOME A MUSLIM Five days before 9/11, Charles Vincent bought his first Koran. Six weeks later, while smoke was still pouring from the remains of the World Trade Center, he formally converted to Islam in the mosque attached to the Islamic Cultural Center on......
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The Red Stuff

Brendan Bernhard
Illustration by Tra Selhtrow "WHAT DO YOU THINK that suit cost?" I asked my wife, showing her the color photograph of Tom Wolfe decked out in a splendid cream-colored ensemble on the back of his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Hand-stitched, custom-tailored, with mother-of-pearl buttons and a gossamer silk......
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The Music of Words

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Don Hunstein So Bob Dylan has finally published a memoir: Chronicles: Volume One. It’s possible the author isn’t sure what exactly the word chronicle means (in a Newsweek interview he more or less admitted this). At any rate, his chronicle isn’t very chronological: He begins the book in......
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What If?

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Nancy Crampton IN FRANZ KAFKA’S NOVEL Amerika, the Statue of Liberty looms majestically over New York Harbor just as it does today. Only with one small, utterly mischievous difference: With her powerful, upraised arm, Lady Liberty brandishes not a torch but a sword. That provocative sense of play......

Au Contraire, Monsieur Boosh

Brendan Bernhard
Why, on a wildly rainy September night in New York, would Dominique de Villepin give a speech in a bunkerlike auditorium two floors below the public library on 42nd Street? Why would the former French foreign minister speak to a roomful of dapper Francophiles and bow-tie-wearing octogenarians on the subject......
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Agent Provocateur

Brendan Bernhard
Photo courtesy Everett/CSU Archives OF ALL THE GREAT 20th-century novelists, Graham Greene (1904–1991) has always seemed the most portable: good for a plane trip as well as an armchair, and rarely coming in at longer than 250 pages. So it’s fitting that the centennial editions of his novels, with introductions......