4Columns

Greater New York Aruna D’Souza A galvanizing exhibition at PS1 showcases NYC art made by and for the people. Greater New York, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves. Pictured, left: fields harrington, Unfree Free Time (Bike Rental), 2026. Right: Cevallos Brothers, Greater New York, 2026.

Drunken Noodles Melissa Anderson A river of bodily emissions runs through it: in Lucio Castro’s new film, the flow of erotic energy proves to be a mystical power. Laith Khalifeh as Adnan in Drunken Noodles. Courtesy Strand Releasing. © Lucio Castro. Drunken Noodles, written and directed by Lucio Castro, now playing at IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, New York City •   •   • Gay is good, as the old slogan has it, and sometimes gay is serendipitous.

This Poor Book Sasha Frere-Jones In her final collection, Fanny Howe witnesses the same world we all see. This Poor Book: A Poem, by Fanny Howe, Graywolf Press, 132 pages, $18 •   •   • “I don’t think I have written a book without a child in it,” Fanny Howe told an interviewer in 2020, five years before her passing in July of 2025. God also sat with her, next to the children.

4Columns arts criticism weekly.

You Won’t Get Free of It Thomas Beller Denial, delusion, dissociation: a new book collects Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker essays about mothers and daughters. You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv, Alfred A.

Boards of Canada Geeta Dayal In the Scottish duo’s album Inferno, a kaleidoscopic range builds up a rich and uncanny sense of atmosphere. Inferno, by Boards of Canada, Warp Records •   •   • Few bands are as charged with nostalgia for a past that never quite existed as Boards of Canada. Nearly three decades after their debut album, 1998’s Music Has the Right to Children, the Scottish duo retains a potent mythos.

Rocío García Julia Bryan-Wilson To have and to withhold: an exhibition of the Cuban artist’s works emphasizes the body’s dynamism even when tied up, gagged, or otherwise confined. Rocío García: The Object of Power is Power, installation view. Photo: Garrett Carroll. © Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

We Were Forbidden Jessi Jezewska Stevens A new volume collects three never-before-translated novellas by Jacqueline Harpman, author of I Who Have Never Known Men. We Were Forbidden, by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz, Transit Books, 90 pages, $18.95 •   •   • When the Belgian-born author Jacqueline Harpman died in 2012, her slim, bleak novel I Who Have Never Known Men, first published in 1995, had fallen into obscurity.

Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium Jennifer Kabat Claudia Horn’s book about one of capitalism’s greatest critics presents a tantalizing vision of Luxemburg the eco-socialist. Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation, by Claudia Horn, OR Books, 225 pages, $30 •   •   • A ziplock bag of dead, leathery tree leaves sits on my desk. I found them at an intersection in Berlin, between the zoo and Muji.