NICK WAPLINGTON'S 'ALEXANDER MCQUEEN: WORKING PROCESS'

Heston Blumenthal, best known as one of Britain’s most decorated chefs and true culinary visionaries, has just released his latest book, Historic Heston. To call it a cookbook wouldn’t be fair, for Blumenthal goes far beyond any standard collection of recipes and dives deep into the murky waters of British cuisine.

The self-taught chef opened his first restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Berkshire, England, in 1995 and despite his lack of culinary training, the restaurant was awarded its first Michelin star after four short years. Since then, Blumenthal has been impressing critics with his uninhibited approach to cooking and his experiments with molecular gastronomy. The restaurant has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for nine years, and currently holds three Michelin stars.

Someone in search of an easy answer might describe the new novel from the young writer Daniel Alarcón as a detective story. But At Night We Walk in Circles is not a book for easy answers, offering up none and eliciting instead only questions and insights that deal with complicated and intricate issues like destiny, identity, and personal agency.

David Vann’s Goat Mountain is a book of blood and guts, of guns and steel, of visceral violence and primal brutality. An eleven-year-old boy out hunting with his grandfather, father, and his father’s friend shoots, accidentally (or not), a poacher who has trespassed on the family’s remote property in Northern California, setting off a spiraling yet incisive contemplation of religion, ethics, and existence couched in a rigorously bleak and unforgiving study of guilt and its absence. There is more death to come, after days of conflict and suffering, as Vann establishes a conception of the self as a being under relentless siege from all sides. And yet the most forceful sentence comes after the novel’s end, in the acknowledgments. “This is the novel that burns away the last of what first made me write,” Vann explains, “the stories of my violent family.”

In her latest novel, Night Film, Marisha Pessl doesn’t hesitate to lead you into the dark. She thrusts you into it, leading you to Central Park in the dead of night, where our antihero, the disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath, is haunted by a young woman in red flitting among the shadows.

A week later, that woman is found dead in a Chinatown elevator shaft.

Last weekend, for four days (really three days and one boozy evening), a thousands-strong peloton of the hottest nerds the hemisphere has to offer trekked to Long Island City to descend on MoMA PS1 for Printed Matter’s eighth annual New York Art Book Fair, a cornucopia of zines; artist’s editions; hand-screened typography prints in editions that top out in double digits; dusty, out-of-print monographs; lithography manuals; cranky tracts; and pretty chapbooks. This year’s fair was fancier, more crowded (an estimated ten thousand bibliophiles elbowed their way among the vendors, who also exhibited in record numbers), and sweatier than ever, and featured more musical performances (both scheduled and improvised) in the courtyard and throughout the sweltering halls than in previous years. It was also noticeably more gourmet, thanks to themed food stations around the courtyard operated by the proprietors of M. Wells, the widely (and justly) praised restaurant concession that decamped earlier this year from a grubby trailer near Jackson Avenue to a new permanent home in the museum’s cafe. During the fair, M. Wells offered a broad range of fare, from sag paneer and a surprisingly adequate ramen in one corner to more-predictable smoked meat sandwiches and cubanos across the way. Inside, French 75’s flowed on tap, a nice accompaniment to a frisée salad garnished with a sunny egg and lardons the size of Jolly Ranchers.

And so, once again, amidst much madness and temptation of every stripe, we braved the crowds, spending several days intently browsing the seemingly innumerable covetable objects on offer across three floors, a large un-air conditioned outdoor tent and PS1’s perennially-dimly-lit, semi-permanent dome. Here are a few of the many highlights.

Long before there was Banksy, there was Fuct. Founded in 1990, the streetwear and skate label helped define the look of the Nineties with its repurposing of iconic images and figures—a Planet of the Apes primate smoking a bong; the Ford logo, retyped as “Fuct;” a set of Rolling Stones lips and tongue, adorned with a hit of acid—onto t-shirts, skateboards, and canvases. This fall, Rizzoli will release a graphic retrospective, a sort of monograph of the brand’s work, authored by its founder, artist Eric Bonetti, as well as the journalist Gary Warnett and the filmmaker and curator Aaron Rose. As Nineties fashion is cited in more and more runway collections, as streetwear and skateboarding’s influence becomes increasingly incalculable, as college kids from Pasadena to Pennsylvania sport “Comme des Fuck Down” baseball hats, it’s the right time to look back at a brand that helped establish the age’s dress and the notion of graphic, transgressive fashion.

Fuct is out now from Rizzoli.

Alexandra Kleeman contributes an unnerving, disconcerting, yet emotionally direct short story as part of our ongoing series of original short fiction.

Tamara Faith Berger’s Little Cat, a new collection of the writer’s first two novellas, is presented as a demure, simple tome. The book’s look is minimal and sleek, not overeager; a design house could coolly call its æsthetic a “sophisticated approach.” Its covers are colored a mature matte cream. Their only picture is a geometrical and alluringly vague paper fortune teller. Inside, there are elegant crimson flyleaves. Solicited on a shelf beside competitors, whose covers might be caked in gauche typography and illustration, Little Cat will sell itself through understatement, will seduce with its modesty.

In other words, this book’s violent pornography is very smartly dressed.

Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home is the work of an author for whom brevity is a push back against the whitewashing of history. Relative to his novels which preceded it—The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai—Ways of Going Home is an epic, yet it completes its telling in just under 140 pages. Why? “Sometimes, when we write, we wash away everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something,” our narrator tells us. “We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory.”