Published in The Village Voice in 1998 under the title Culture Shocker. The article text is not present in this archive entry, which points readers to a PDF scan of the original.

Originally published in the Forward in 1997. A profile of Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg on the American release of Blue Mondays by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, covering his years as a high school dropout, the bankruptcy of his Kasimir Press, and his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. Grunberg, then 25 and living in New York, discusses the novel’s bestseller status in Holland.

Published in The Village Voice, 1996, and filed under reviews. The archived entry holds only a link to a PDF scan; no article text is reproduced here.

Originally published in The Washington Post, 1996. A review of Leslie Fiedler’s essay collection The Tyranny of the Normal, which ranges across organ transplants, sideshow freaks, and the religious core of the 1960s counterculture. Pinchbeck argues that Fiedler abandons critical rigor for personal performance, and that his claims about the popular mind overstep what his kind of criticism can support.

Published in The Washington Post in 1996 under the title She Took Manhattan. The article text is not present in this archive entry, which points readers to a PDF scan of the original.

A 1996 Washington Post review of Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. The book argues that human male violence descends from patterns visible in chimpanzees, and that the peaceable, sexually promiscuous bonobos living across the Zaire River point to an alternative rooted in female social bonds. Pinchbeck endorses the authors’ feminist optimism over more Machiavellian readings of human nature.

Written for The New York Times in 1996. A profile of identical twin animators Timothy and Stephen Quay, timed to the US premiere of their first live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta, adapted from Robert Walser’s novella Jacob von Gunten. The piece covers their Philadelphia origins, their London career, the puppet film Street of Crocodiles, and the influence of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer.

This 1995 Village Voice piece survives in the archive only as a link to a PDF scan. No text accompanies the entry, so its subject cannot be described.

Written for The New York Times in 1995. The title refers to a maverick whose grandfather told off F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the archive entry holds only a link to a PDF scan; no article text is reproduced.