Believer, Issue 67

The Believer #67

by Heidi Julavits (Editor), Ed Park (Editor), Vida Vendela (Editor)

The Believer monthly books and culture magazine is three-time finalist for National Magazine Awards in General Excellence and Design. An amiable yet rigorous forum for books and book criticism, The Believer provides an alternative to the plot summary that has increasingly become synonymous with "book review," extending the ever-shortening shelf life of new books, reviving interest in books long overlooked, and stressing the interconnectivity of books to pop culture, politics, art, and music. To that end, each issue includes essays on these topics, as well as lengthy interviews with philosophers, politicians, and poets. Nick Hornby has a widely celebrated monthly books column, and Amy Sedaris (and well-known guest-columnists) offers an advice column comprised of hilariously bad advice. The celebrated graphic novelist Charles Burns illustrates the cover each month, and the magazine is littered with illustrations by a wide range of established and emerging artists, with regulars like Tony Millionaire, Marcel Dzama, and others.

87 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney's Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003) and The Uses of Enchantment (2006) and The Vanishers (2012).

She was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.

She wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (subtitled: "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue of The Believer, a publication which attempts to avoid snarkiness and "give people and books the benefit of the doubt."

In 2005, she told the New York Times culture writer A.O. Scott how'd she decided on The Believer's tone: "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't." She added her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."

She has also written short stories, such as "The Santosbrazzi Killer", which was published in Harper's Magazine.

Julavitz currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children

Reviews

[G · Rating 2 out of 5]

This visual art issue of the Believer contains some brilliance and a lot of "meh." In short: fantastic history of race in comics focused on Morrie Turner, a hearty helping of crazy in Michelle Tea's descriptions of her art friends at Annie Sprinkle's fifth wedding to her lady friend and the ocean, a laugh-out-loud ironic article about bringing art to the masses by creating insufferable performance art exhibitions in Paris, a brilliantly-told story of the fickleness of fame about artist-turned-donut fryer Ford Beckman, a ridiculous description of the "costs" of fine art photography (where said costs include flying the artist's mother to Europe to watch her kid while she photographed dishes, which had to be done in Europe, see?), a whole lot of so-so interviews of artists often conducted via email...

But the best things were the mug shots of literary criminals and the gorgeous comics page.