A 1995 Washington Post review of John Pemble’s Venice Rediscovered, which traces how Byron, Ruskin, Henry James, and John Addington Symonds turned Venice into a myth of exquisite decadence. Pinchbeck follows Pemble’s argument that preservation proved as fatal to the city as modernization would have been, embalming it for tourists by the time D.H. Lawrence dismissed it in 1928.

A review for Artforum of Turn Off Your Mind, Gary Lachman’s history of the occult currents running from Theosophy and Aleister Crowley through Sixties youth culture. Pinchbeck argues that Lachman fixates on Charles Manson, Anton LaVey, and Scientology while ignoring the movement’s more substantive legacies: Findhorn, The Farm, herbalism, and the Western uptake of Tibetan Buddhism.

Written for the Forward in 1994. The piece reviews Tropical Synagogues, Ilan Stavans’s anthology of Jewish Latin American short fiction, and reports on its launch at New York’s Americas Society. It notes Alberto Gerchunoff’s ideal of the Jewish gaucho, stories by Moacyr Scliar and Isaac Goldemberg, and Stavans’s claim that these writers remain isolated from mainstream culture.