Mentioned this week: six books called Audition, and more
Extremely abbreviated reviews from Issue Sixteen
After a campaign season that has grown to an almost presidential length, the Academy Awards have at last come and gone, leaving a gaping hole in the lives of those whose primary source of entertainment is arguing about whether or not things have received the appropriate degree of critical acclaim. Luckily, this jam-packed Mentions newsletter has enough fuel to power watercooler debates across America until next year’s Oscar race begins in earnest, presumably in a few weeks. Read on for our top critics’ takes on an overly cheery exclamation point, a million-dollar wine cellar, and winning the war with yourself.
Six books called Audition
LITERATURE
Two novels with this title came out in the U.S. this year. Katie Kitamura’s is about an actor playing multiple roles in her family. Pip Adam’s is about an audient spaceship fueled by the speech of its imprisoned giants. Four other Auditions precede them: Stasia Ward Kehoe’s young-adult novel in verse, Barbara Walters’s autobiography, Ryū Murakami’s horror novel, and Michael Shurtleff’s how-to guide for actors. Each is good — Kitamura’s is the best — but only Adam’s has a great title.
Ben Gottlieb
Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025
EVENT
Europe’s “Mecca of photography” tried to position itself as radical this year. The theme of the 56th installment of the annual festival was “Disobedient Images,” in celebration of the role of the photograph as “an instrument of resistance.” Yet none of the dozens of exhibitions on view included any mention or image of the genocide in Gaza. (When artist Nan Goldin projected the word “GAZA” behind her on stage as she accepted the Women in Motion award, several attendees walked out.) An even clearer expression of defiance came from the unaffiliated documentary studio Doubledummy, which staged a counter-festival drawing attention to work by Gazan photographers to critique the festival’s omission. It turns out photos can only become instruments of resistance when they’re given the space to be seen.
Alexander Durie
Second Sacred Concert
ALBUM
Duke Ellington turned toward God near the end of his long, mostly secular career. The King of Big Band Jazz released two religious albums in the sixties, the second more emphatic and riveting than any in his career. This aptly named 1968 record is like a faith-led IMAX event — all horns and crashing cymbals, with plaintive strings replacing his usually lithesome piano. On one track, the Swedish vocalist Alice Babs, whose range spanned three octaves, sings an operatic scat arrangement that contains no actual words. Duke called it “TGTT,” or “Too Good to Title.”
Will Dukes
Ghost Driver
FICTION
It’s difficult for novels about neurotic losers crushed by indifferent bureaucracies to avoid the long shadow of Kafka. But in her debut, English writer Nell Osborne manages to achieve a grimly comic sensibility that feels distinctly her own. The narrator of this tale of misery and doom has a gift for Customer Service Voice and a strong grasp of the passive-aggressive potential of an overly cheery exclamation point.
Sam Ross
75 Hard
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
This trendy exercise program, created in 2019 by podcaster and supplement entrepreneur Andy Frisella, went viral on TikTok during the pandemic and has remained popular in hustle culture circles. Frisella boasts of “winning the war with yourself” through “transformative mental toughness” over the course of 75 days. Adherents are given, among other tasks, a daily reading goal: ten pages of any self-help book. This endearingly petite morsel of homework is supposed to be roughly as difficult as the other assignments, such as drinking a gallon of water or completing two 45-minute workouts (one outside, regardless of weather). According to the program’s introductory email, “audiobooks DO NOT COUNT.”
Olivia Noble
80 Clarkson
DEVELOPMENT
This two-tower development rising over New York City’s West Side Highway contains an eighty-million-dollar penthouse, a one-million-dollar wine cellar, and an 82-foot swimming pool. But it may be more interesting to consider what the building doesn’t have, like nearly five hundred affordable housing units or an outdoor public recreation center — two features that were promised, on a now-scrubbed government website, when the city rezoned the land in 2016 in order to allow Atlas Capital Group and Westbrook Partners to, as they say in the real estate business, go nuts. Atlas and Westbrook shook hands and then promptly sold part of the land to another developer that built a swanky new office building for Google, leaving room for just a third of the proposed units. Those past pledges seem to have been lost in the fog of 80 Clarkson’s private steam room.
Jacob Indursky
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
NONFICTION
My favorite detail in Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is that when the intellectual father of the neoconservative movement got peckish on sailing trips, he liked to raid lobstermen’s traps for a nosh. Though only a minor skirmish in the class war Buckley waged from above, the anecdote calls to mind a preening interview he gave The Atlantic in 1968, four years after Yale had awarded Martin Luther King Jr. an honorary law degree. Dr. King, Buckley sneered, “more clearly qualifies as a doctor of lawbreaking.” Tanenhaus knew and liked Buckley, but the portrait that emerges in this careful book, sketched over the course of three decades of research, makes it hard to share the author’s affection for his subject. Buckley was a covert correspondent of J. Edgar Hoover’s, the secret funder of a newspaper in South Carolina founded to oppose desegregation, a reflexive hawk, a free-market evangelist, and an anti-communist (he was once pleasingly referred to as “McCarthy’s egghead”). In one respect, at least, Buckley has surpassed his old rival Gore Vidal: Buckley’s authorized biography breaks a thousand pages.