Nevada Rose in the Paris Review!
Congratulations to Marc McAndrews, whose spring release Nevada Rose was just covered in the Paris Review! Jenna Wortham’s beautifully written review of Marc’s book and appearance at the Museum of Sex is well-worth the read. Check out our favorite excerpt:
“[T]he most captivating thing about the hundreds of photographs featured inside the book isn’t the suggestion of sex that seeps out of every crevice, the promise of pleasure that lurks behind each half-open doorway; it’s not the vast expanses of exposed cleavage and thigh, nor the resplendent rooms, draped in gold curtains and leopard sheets; it’s not even the gazes of the women—steady, coy, tired, beckoning, defiant. It’s the minutiae. It’s the photographs of yellowed time cards waiting to be punched, the shelves of chipped coffee mugs, rows of nail polish in a makeshift beauty salon, a pair of discarded Lucite stilettos. Bureaucracy is everywhere in the pictures. There are stacks of paperwork to be filed, piles of egg timers used to measure out the minutes of each customer’s visit. There are intercoms, telephones, and panic buttons in all the rooms. It is finally not the illictness but the banality of it all that is most riveting: automatic cash machines, heaps of freshly laundered towels, canisters of baby wipes on an end table, shift schedules scrawled in dry-erase marker on a white board. These images make the viewer understand that behind the facade of a world where pleasure and fantasy are distilled to a commodity, there are still the unmistakable trappings of domesticity, of office work: the mundane reality of a job, like any other.”
