Forty-one False Starts
by Janet Malcolm (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27)
Journalists who profile artists often forget that making things is hard work, said Pamela Erens in TheMillions.com. Not New Yorker contributor Janet Malcolm. In this collection of profiles of various painters, photographers, and authors, process always matters more than personality. It’s a “very refreshing” approach, even after Malcolm discovers that J.D. Salinger, Diane Arbus, and several other legends all apparently believed that they never created work as great as they’d hoped to.
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Duncan Wall was a circus skeptic before he became an aficionado, said Elizabeth McCracken in The Washington Post. In this “lovely” new book, the young lecturer at the National Circus School of Montreal covers an “astonishing” amount of circus history while recounting how a kid bored by circus acts eventually chose to learn acrobatics, juggling, and clowning. Those first-person chapters lack drama, but Wall is terrific at explaining why each act is an art, a way to get audiences dreaming.
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