Nathan Ihara

Seeing double: Shelley Jackson imagines a world populated by Siamese twins. (Self-portrait by Shelley Jackson)

Sex in the Age of Irony

Nathan Ihara
A friend of mine has been working as a dominatrix in a high-end dungeon, and we’d been kicking around the idea of writing a book about it. Our spin on the sexy tell-all was going to be the sense of humor, the wry asides, our surprisingly light treatment of the......
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It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World

Nathan Ihara
Former Young & Rubicam advertising executive James P. Othmer has written a debut novel so slick and seductive, you’ll find yourself reaching for your wallet without even knowing what’s for sale. The product is the book’s protagonist: the world-famous “futurist” Yates, a trend-spotter, televisionary, buzz-whisperer and bullshit artist. The guy......
Utterly clever

Lemony Snippets

Nathan Ihara
Once, in a writing workshop I attended, a young woman presented her short story to the class. She was an irrefutably clever writer, she had already been published in some of the liveliest, most irreverent journals, and one by one we nodded our heads and agreed that her story was......
Chris Abani doesn't simply serve up another steaming dish of atrocity; he strives for something more sublime and illusive.

Poor, Solitary, Nasty, Brutish and Short

Nathan Ihara
Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, the follow-up to his PEN/Hemingway award–winning Graceland, is rich with suffering. In 34 brief and lyrical chapters, Abani sketches the life of Abigail Tansi, a 14-year-old Igbo girl. It is abjectly Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The novella begins with a flashback to the......
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The Coffee Table, Revisited

Nathan Ihara
Tom Knechtel’s oil paintings are spellbinding. In On Wanting To Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel (Fellows of Contemporary Art, 128 pages, $45), time disjoints as one lingers, childlike, over his cornucopia of visual delights, his phantasmagoric bestiary, his promiscuous hallucinations, his ecstatic lyricism. In Lessons in the......
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Oh! Mary! What the Hell Has Been Going On!

Nathan Ihara
DOWN THE STREET FROM THE graveyard and cater-cornered to the ubiquitous Southern Baptist church is where you'll find Mary Robison and her four white cats. She's altogether too striking a figure for the Wal-Marts and Sonic Burgers of Hattiesburg, Mississippi: Gray and black hair swoops down around her olive skin......
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The Pocko Collection

Nathan Ihara
HIP LITTLE ART BOOKS ARE A DIME A DOZEN (or so it seems) but the Pocko Collection is particularly ambitious -- like their ostensible namesake, the first tightrope walker to cross Niagara Falls. Founded in London in 1999 by Royal College of Art graduates, the Pocko Group aims to publish......
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Undead Band Talking

Nathan Ihara
Photo by Rita O'Brien "OH SHIT!" A SEVEN-HOUR DRIVE FROM "THE Grog Shop" in Cleveland, and the Gossip have just poured transmission fluid into the oil tank of their '85 white superdeluxe Chevy van. "Is that bad?" guitarist Nathan Howdeshell (a.k.a. Brace Paine, a.k.a. Druxxx) asks as the cell phone......

OBEY?

Nathan Ihara
Fairey’s progeny, in Hollywood and beyond Maybe you were on the freeway when you saw it: an ugly face wheat-pasted to a building or billboard, another blip in your peripheral vision. Maybe you spotted a sticker first, stuck to a stop sign, a parking meter or a seat in the......

Boy-Oh-Boy

Nathan Ihara
Photo by Debra DiPaolo NICK LOWE, 21 AND A HALF, IS IN HIS STUDIO explaining boy-oh-boy art: "'Boy-oh-boy' was the title of one of Ry Rocklen's shows, and since then we've decided we both have a boy-oh-boy aesthetic. On one level, we're just using art to flesh out adolescent fantasies......