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.

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.