ANDREEA DIACONU

The young actor Zachary Booth is already a familiar face on stage and small screen, where he played Glenn Close’s son throughout the run of Damages. He takes on another big-name matriarch tomorrow with the opening of Last Weekend, a family drama in which Patricia Clarkson plays his mother. Today, we revisit our earlier profile of Booth, then on the verge of his breakout role in Keep the Lights On.

When Ben Lerner produced his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station in 2011, he was already an acclaimed poet with three highly regarded collections of poetry to his name. He published his début, which centered on a young American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, with Coffee House Press and “didn’t think anyone would read it,” he says. Leaving the Atocha Station went on to become one of the most talked-about novels of the year, appearing on several best-books lists. Now Lerner is back with a new novel, 10:04, which again focuses on an American writer trying to finish a creative work. This time, the narrator is a poet who, having earned critical accolades with his first novel from a small press, receives a six-figure advance from a major New York publishing house to write a new one.

After operating out of various skate shops and high-end luxury stores worldwide such as colette, Dover Street Market, and Opening Ceremony for the past year, the Swedish unisex sneaker brand Eytys (pronounced “Eighties”) has opened its very first stand-alone store in its hometown of Stockholm. The new space embodies the confident, fuss-free æsthetic with which the brand has rapidly become synonymous on the strength of its sharp, sleek sneaker silhouettes. “Having a store has been a dream, and the creative process started to take shape in my mind years ago,” says co-owner Max Schiller. “I guess you can compare the obsession with the way teenage girls fantasize about their wedding day.”

“I usually act on instinct,” explains London-based designer Hannah Barr. The Glasgow native, whose pieces often look more like sculptures than more expected articles of apparel, says she came on slow to fashion. “I did look at Vogue from a young age, but then I was more into the models than the clothes!” Barr relates. “I suppose it evolved from there into me wanting to make clothing for these people and move to London.”

In just one year since we first featured him, Domhnall Gleeson has gone from the sidelights to the limelight. From supporting roles in Anna Karenina and Never Let Me Go, Gleeson is now—however reluctantly—one of Hollywood’s most promising lead actors, starring opposite Michael Fassbender in Frank earlier this year. Gleeson’s latest film, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, has become a winter smash, and he’s since signed on to a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. But buzz is already building over his starring role in Star Wars: Episode VII, directed by J.J. Abrams. We catch up with the young Irish actor just before his life changes forever.

The Top Chef semi-finalist has become a New York culinary fixture, helming The Surf Lodge in Montauk. We caught up with Talbot after dinner service, at the beginning of his tenure, over drinks.

You know the review. It was published in ’79 and dubbed one of Lester Bangs’ best: ardent, unfeigned, and self-confessional, a messy, lyrical, truly revelational review of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Bangs, sweaty and substance-addicted (and in spite of it, completely brilliant) walked his readers through an extended period of loneliness and despair. He then introduced them to Astral Weeks, as though it were some sort of holy statue, an auditory altarpiece through which secrets of hurt and longing and the disintegration of relationships could be illuminated.

“Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he’s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along.”

Cut to LP1, the much-hyped, virgin album from Tahliah Barnett (alias FKA Twigs) and you’ll glimpse something of the nascent intensity, the eternal, broken truths, that Bangs once found in Morrison’s record. Signed to UK label Young Turks—home to Jamie xx, Sampha, and SBTRKT—FKA Twigs makes music that’s called a lot of things, mainly trip hop and PBR&B. It’s unsurprising to read the musician referring to herself as a loner in interviews. From the outset, LP1 is toxic, guarded, paranoid. At times it feels like treading water, and at other points as though someone has pushed you under, forcing you to swallow salt, cutting off all air.

After originally arriving in London to pursue a degree in product design, Tigran Avetisyan changed direction after two years and enrolled in Central Saint Martins’ revered menswear course. Throughout the following four years, the Russia native honed his skills, supplementing academia with stints at international brands such as Acne Studios, Dunhill, and Lanvin. Sponsored by luxury conglomerate LVMH, the young designer’s graduate collection made headlines as a riotous proclamation of his personal and fellow students’ concerns with reality behind school doors. Slogans penned in harshly contrasting white on black chalk paint applied directly onto simple fabrics in light blues served as a visual diary of the preceding few months and an unsure future. The collection introduced some of Avetisyan’s principal themes, alongside a design signature in fabrics and cut. Referencing traditional workwear and institutional dress, the collection featured cropped trousers and oversized garments labeled as ‘One Size Fits None.’ Underpinned by the ethos of Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education” mantra, baggy coats fastening at the back appeared as the vestiges of a boyhood lost.

In her daring début, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey puts into words the secret, unspoken desire so many of us harbor: to just leave your life and responsibilities without any explanation and go do something else. While few of us will ever actually do this, Nobody Is Ever Missing cuts deep and tries to understand why that desire persists.