The Believer, Issue 99

The Believer #99

by Vendela Vida (Editor), Heidi Julavits (Editor), Andrew Leland (Editor)

The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. It features long articles, interviews, and book reviews, as well as poems, comics, and a two-page vertically-oriented Schema spread, more or less unreproduceable on the web. The common thread in all these facets is that the Believer gives people and books the benefit of the doubt (the working title of this magazine was the Optimist).

On each issue, Charles Burns's beautiful illustrations adorn the cover; our regular raft of writers, artists, and photographers fill the pages; and the feel of the Westcan Printing Group’s gorgeous “Roland Enviro 100 Natural” recycled acid-free heavy stock paper warms your heart.

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 2013

About the author

Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of four books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers, and a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She is also the co-editor of Always Apprentices, a collection of interviews with writers, and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. As a fellow at the Sundance Labs, she developed Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name into a script, which received the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award. Two of Vida’s novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the year, and she is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children, and since 2002 has served on the board of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring lab for youth.

Reviews

[Jane Yu · Rating 4 out of 5]

notes:
--alan moore (the transhuman state of fiction)
"If time is an illusion, then all movement and change are also illusions. So the only thing that gives us the illusion of movement and change and events and time is the fact that our consciousness is moving through this mass along the time axis. If you imagine it as a strip of celluloid, each of those individual cells is motionless. If they each represent a moment, they're unchanging. They're not going anywhere, but as the projector beam of our consciousness passes across them, it provides the illusion of movement, and narrative and cause and effect and circumstances."
--bob gluck (ever domestic arrangement is a separate subculture, the collecting impuse is the desire for safety)
--definition of an asshole (nick hornby's column): "An asshole is usefully defined as a person who 'systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.'"
--racism is a form of isolation (and exposure)
--joyce carol oates' favorite artists: helen frankenthaler, clyfford still, diebenkorn, arthur dove, hopper (aside from matisse, cezanne and rothko).
--movie villains who drink milk <3

[Linnie Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was only one piece that I skipped upon first read (the one with the visual artist, which I'm sure is worth reading; caveat here is that it just didn't grab me at the time). Favorites for me were the Mithradates-man from WI (he let black mambas and the like bite him, for the sake of building immunity, the Alan Moore interview, and the interview with poet Bob Gluck, who seems like someone I'd want to be friends with, had I the wit to keep up.

However, the true take-home point is, quite simply, this: JOYCE CAROL OATES. ULTIMATE NUMBER ONE BADASS LADY/INTELLECTUAL/BEST THINKING PERSON. If I was already JCO's #1 fangirl, this might've solidified things.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): I cannot recommend the June issue of The Believer highly enough. I bought it for the Joyce Carol Oates interview. I stayed for Kent Russell’s profile of a Wisconsin Applebee’s enthusiast by day, snake-venom self-injecting mithridate by night who keeps his black mambas stacked in Rubbermaid containers on the floor of his unfinished shed/house in Fond Du Lac. The Victoria Chang poem will blow you outta your flip-flops, too, you beach readers, ye.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars - Loved the mix in this issue. The essays and interviews weren't focused on a specific theme, but there were tiny sparks that seemed to tie elements together at unconventional places. This issue of The Believer is a good reminder that there are a lot of interesting people on this planet.