Images by Brandie Raasch Boater hats, flapper fashion and back-beats---not to mention Bill Cunningham---brought some roaring style to last weekend's Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governors Island. Click "Read More" for additional images. Photographer Bill Cunningham

Nancy De Holl is a New York based artist who shows at Taxter and Spengemann.

After reading the story The Shell Collector when it came out in 2002 I xeroxed it and gave it out to everyone I knew. It's just one of those stories that is so good you want to share it. I find this to be true of everything I've read of Anthony Doerr's. In general his stories tend to run long, almost verging on novella length. I think that's part of what I love about them- substantial enough to really get into the characters, the scene and the story- with settings that take place all over the globe, allowing the reader a detailed trip through Africa, Lithuania, Germany, China, Idaho, Kansas or Rome. Another thing I love about Doerr's writing: it's filled with science. See, this is funny because I don't really like science and I definitely don't know anything about science, but if you sneak it into some well written fiction, apparently I'm all over it. The Shell Collector reminds me of a marine biology class from many years ago, but marine biology class was never this good. Doerr's latest book, Memory Wall is a collection of six stories that examine the role of memory in our life. The characters range from old women at the end of their lives to a couple trying to create life. In the final story, "Afterworld" an elderly woman has seizures that rocket her back to her childhood in an orphanage in Nazi Germany, allowing her to skate through the past and present fluidly. "The River Nemunas" is about a little girl searching for memories of her late immigrant mother through learning how to fish with an old woman. And "Procreate, Generate" is a somewhat simple story of a couple in Idaho trying to get pregnant that has a raw, sincere quality to it. All of the stories deal with our perception of memory and how strongly our present identity is linked to the past. Doerr has an innate ability to write about the sticky, uncomfortability of life in such a beautiful way that a story about an old woman with Alzheimer's is not merely sad but intriguing and charming. When we first started Dossier, I had a wish list of writers that I wanted to be involved in the magazine, and contacted Doerr asking him if he wanted to be involved. He mentioned he was looking to be sent to the space station so he could write a piece about it. Well, we couldn't do that but we're pleased to tell you that he just contributed an essay on portraiture for our next issue, with images shot by Jessica-Craig Martin. And if there are any other editors out there- he is still looking to go to space. I hope he gets there because I would love to read that essay with all its science bits. Here, Doerr was kind enough to talk a little bit with us about memories, Idaho and the best part of summer. Katherine Krause: How did you start writing? Anthony Doerr: I was hammering out stories about my Playmobil pirate ship on my mother's typewriter when I was nine. I always felt amazed that the books on my shelves were written by human beings, not Gods, that anyone with enough determination and patience and guts could write one. I still feel amazed at that. Katherine: When you were younger, was there anything else you wanted to be? From your stories it is obvious you have a comprehensive view of science, particularly biology- where does that come from? You write a column on science books for the Boston Globe, would you ever write a book on science yourself? Anthony: An architect. And a malacologist (someone who studies mollusks). The love for science comes mostly from my mother, who has been a science teacher all her life. And it comes from being outside--I was outside all the time as a kid, climbing trees, fishing, rock climbing, capturing snails in Florida. I'm still outside as much as my life will allow me to be. Katherine: You write both fiction and non-fiction- is there one that you prefer? Anthony: I prefer fiction. But sometimes an essay is just waiting there, some spark of an idea for me to fumble after on the page. Often essays come from more practical urges (i.e., a magazine will pay me to write one), but fiction is my truest love, mostly because I find it so challenging and absorbing. Ultimately I just like mucking about with language and feel intensely grateful that I've been able to do so in my life. Katherine: Do you have a specific writing process or ritual? How often and for how long do you write a day? Anthony: Yep, I rent an office away from my house. I show up in the morning, strap on chainsaw-operator's earmuffs, turn over a big old-fashioned hourglass, and try to write for two whole turns of the hourglass. Then I let myself take a break to, say, check email and answer interview questions. On good days I can do a lot more than two hours, and on bad days I don't quite make it through two turns of the hourglass. Those days I'm usually cranky. Katherine: You've said that you end up writing stories that are too long to be short stories or too short to be novels. Is this on purpose or by accident? Anthony: I think it's mostly by accident. Stories form slowly on the page for me, in a slow accretion of days, and mostly in one's subconscious. One can't always control how large their structures will be. For me, right now, they keep ending up around 50 or 60 or 70 pages. Katherine: Do you think the novella will a renaissance? Anthony: That sure would be nice! One likes to think that with iPad and Kindles and such, more and more readers will be willing to take on a nice juicy novella. Katherine: Why did you choose the theme of memory for your collection of short stories? Did you purposely write these stories to be part of a bigger collection relating to memory or were you just in the memory zone? It seems like a lot of the characters in Memory Wall are isolated or abandoned and their memories are there to comfort them, but you suggest that the memories will also abandon them. What made you start thinking about that? Did someone in your family have Alzheimer's or Dementia? Anthony: When I was in high school, my grandmother began to act in confusing ways, and even endanger herself, so Mom and Dad brought her from Toledo to Cleveland to live with us. She quickly deteriorated; she couldn't remember my parents' names; she always worried about where her purse was. In the evenings she'd sit at the kitchen table and ask, over and over, to be taken home. And at night she'd stand in the hall and call names and addresses into the dark. I remember that my mom had to bathe her--my mother, bathing her mother. And yet, most days, Grandma could still crush me at gin-rummy! When the burden got to be too much for my folks, and they started looking for homes for Grandma, was the first time I'd heard of Alzheimer's. What a strange and terrible disease. Then, though I was too young to appreciate what my parents (especially my mother) were going through, I did learn in some fundamental way that our identities are absolutely and irrevocably tied up in memory. Lose your memories, lose yourself. This new book is in many ways an attempt to being to understand my parents' pain, and to investigate the role memory plays in the lives of all of us as we grow up, age, and cope with grief. Katherine: The title story has a science fiction slant- is that a genre you are attracted to or would write more of? Anthony: Mainly I'm interested in things I think are fascinating. Like parachutes and people who eat songbirds and pretty little snails that can poison big, strong adult humans and kill them. That particular story came out of an assignment from McSweeney's to write a story set in the near-future. The conceit of the memory cartridges--that someday doctors might record our memories--is actually something neuroscientists are beginning to work on. Is is science fiction? Ultimately, I don't mind either way--that's for a critic to decide. Katherine: There is one story in Memory Wall set in Idaho, but the rest take place all over the world- did you have a connection to each of these places? Lithuania, South Africa, Germany, Ohio, Kansas, China... Anthony: Yes. Travel fuels my work and I keep a journal everywhere I go. I find I can write better, see more clearly, and think more largely when I get out of my habits and put myself in unfamiliar situations. I was in Germany on book tour, Lithuania working with teachers, Kansas to give a reading, etc... I don't always know that I'm going to set a story somewhere until long after I've returned, but for me a chief pleasure of reading and writing is feeling transported--is taking a reader to another place, and showing it to her in all its beauty and weather and heartache. So traveling and reading and writing are all very similar endeavors for me, all ways to try to live a meaningful life. Katherine: How did you end up in Idaho? Anthony: I fell in love with a woman who grew up in Boise. Katherine: What are you working on next? Anthony: A novel about the power and magic of radio, set during World War II, when radio was both helping drive the German expansion and--eventually--bringing it down. Katherine: As far as being a writer, did you ever have an "I made it" moment and if so, what was it? (For example a friend said his was when he heard his song turned into musak in an elevator.) Anthony: Well, I don't really feel like I've "made it," mostly because writing remains so damn hard for me, but twice I've seen strangers holding my book on airplanes. That's sort of staggering to me. And not so long ago I took my kids to a swimming pool and there was a woman there reading one of my books in a chaise lounge. We swam for an hour or so and she read that whole time and then we left and she was still reading. That felt pretty great. Katherine: What are you reading right now? What are you reading next? Anthony: I'm reading a manuscript of Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, which will be published next year. And after that I'm going to read David Mitchell's new novel. (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.) Katherine: If you had to pick five books for a desert island, what would they be? What's the one book that gives you the most inspiration? Anthony: Moby Dick, by Melville. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy. The Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Dubliners, by Joyce. And for my fifth and last book, I'd cheat and bring one of those massively thick anthologies of short stories, The Story and Its Writer by Anne Charters. Sixteen hundred onionskin pages, one hundred and fifteen short stories, three pounds. The stories in that particular book are arranged alphabetically by their writers: Chinua Achebe to Richard Wright, and reading it I learned so much about how flexible stories can be, how so many different minds from so many different times and cultures have used to it stretch the form. That particular anthology is, bar none, the most inspiring book on my shelves. Katherine: What's the last good exhibit you saw? Anthony: I was at MOMA a few weeks ago and found myself mesmerized by Kara Walker's gigantic installation of paper cutouts in the atrium. It's called: Gone: An Historical Romance of A Civil War as It Occured b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. I don't even know all that much about Gone with the Wind and yet still Walker's huge mural held my attention for a long time: the comic grotesquerie of it, the questions about race that it asks, and the technical skill! Katherine: Tell us something you love about Boise, Idaho. Anthony: I love to float the Boise River right through the center of town in a big inflatable raft with my six-year-old twin sons. We eat sunflower seeds and I listen to them tell me what they see. Katherine: What's your favorite thing about summer? Anthony: Finding myself in lots of good situations to look at the stars.

I shot Crystal Renn a few years ago and found her to be hands-down one of the best models I have ever had the chance to work with. She takes her job incredibly seriously and thus is seriously good at it. Plus you can't take a bad picture of her, which I know people say but in this case happens to actually be true. I've been wanting to shoot her again, and I recently had the chance to. I did a cover shoot with stylist Aya Kanai for this new Canadian magazine called The Block. Below is a video of Crystal dancing between shots in a VPL bodysuit. I also just need to point out that the fact that she is a plus size model is pretty crazy and says a lot of things about the fashion industry - none of them good. Click "Read More" for the video.

I met Swedish designer Amanda Ericsson in a dark little bar in Paris. After a few minutes spent exchanging pleasantries, she flashed me a coy smile and removed her coat. There, pinned to the front and dead-center of her pants, was a small, white tassled brooch. A grappe de chatte, she calls it (literally, a pussy cluster, jewelry designed to draw attention to la chatte). It was the latest in a string of projects related to dreamandawake, Amanda’s workshop-based dress-refashioning collective. In addition to remaking dresses and other garments that are painstakingly collected in flea markets all over the world, the designer routinely collaborates with a stable of fashion photographers – Lina Scheynius, Richard Kern, Ana Kras, Chris Heads and Roberto Rubalcava, among them – to photograph the dresses with Amanda as their model and muse. The concept for dreamandawake is simple. Amanda travels the world buying vintage dresses and brings them back to her London studio to take them apart and resew them. Each object has a precious history. Amanda can tell you the story of every dress she's sold, like one she tells below about an Algerian doctor who cured her sick friend. From today until Saturday, dreamandawake will be participating an exhibition of erotic photography in Sweden, called Ne te promène donc pas toute nue! (translation: Don't walk naked) curated by Emeric Glayse. Julie Cirelli: How does photography relate to your dress-making project? Amanda Ericsson: I have found it more workable for me to speak about recycling and sustainability in the terms of pictures and photos. I like to go back to basics, to remind people why we wear clothes- that fashion is a concept beyond those basic needs we once had. We do more than cover up our naked bodies, we are driven by wishes for transformation, renewal and demand. Today, an enormous amount of clothes are mass-produced in huge factory cities. Materials travel from one or more corners of the world, trimmings from another, the assembly is made in yet another – and then we can multiply this complexity by 100 and still not get the picture of the history of a garment. How could I sell something with a sense of responsibility when I no longer have control over its heritage? And I am not talking about a manufactured heritage like the stories created by branding agencies – but the actual history of the production of the garment. How can I, as a producer, assure that every person along the chain has been treated well and has had his or her basic needs fulfilled? Finally, in the end, when so much effort has gone into producing this something, this little piece of clothing, from the first person picking the cotton from the ground to the last person putting it on the shelf- I think it would be disrespectful if we didn’t use this little bit of textile until the last fiber in it has vanished and been transformed into dust. Julie: You and Lina Scheynius seem to work on everything together: you model for her photos and she for yours, and you make such lovely videos together. Tell me a good story about something you did or made together recently. Amanda: One of my all-time favorite clips is this one. I remember these three separate moments – the first is on the Trans-Mongolian train, the second in Shanghai and third in Beijing. But it is the eating-the-plum scene in the third that I particularly like, because it was shot in a small hotel room in Beijing during one of our little moments of rest in 2007. Lina was terribly sick and I was just about to go out and find her a doctor. I found an Algerian doctor in a long white dress that treated Lina with chocolates and dried apples. He also touched her stomach and told her that it was time for her to have a child. Me, he told it was time to work harder, and later that night I joined the doctor for a dance at the disco. Lina got better and we took off on a train to Ulan Bataar where we met the man who later shot The Man of Our Life in Moscow. Julie: How about the other photographers you work with. Who are they and how do you work together with them? Amanda: They all get free hands to play around with the dresses, and they decide exactly where, what and with whom they want to shoot. Some of them improvise with sudden impulses, others plan their shoots carefully. I always find it intriguing to watch their different techniques and ways of depicting the dresses in different places and situations. Julie: Tell me about the book you made. Who and what is inside it? Amanda: dreamandawake 01 is a photo book that we made in 2008 as a printed version of some of the series that are shown in the online gallery. The book contains the first of the many photo series that have been made with the dresses. The photographers included are Lina Scheynius, Benoit Grimalt, Vincent Ferrané, Yin John, Roberto Rubalcava, Daniele Ratti, Jesper Ulvelius. Each series has its own story (as well as each book, since every cover is hand-folded by Yin John/temptemps herself). Barbie Blues was shot on a Sunday morning in Paris by Roberto Rubalcava, who had just woken up during his little visit to the old studio that Lina and I shared in 2008. He soon started to fiddle around with his last pack of polaroids, which he fired off within an hour. Ten dresses later, we had the series that became the first dreamandawake exhibition at Mycroft gallery in Paris 2008. Dream was shot by Lina in a friend's studio in Shanghai where we stayed just before heading off to Beijing, and on the Trans-Mongolian railway. The Man of Our Life was shot in Moscow by Italian photographer Daniele Ratti, who showed up an hour before our planned meeting time and immediately started to shoot us in the room. This man kind of excited me and I got trapped in the daze and haze of enjoyment of his company. Julie: You make some rather unusual jewelry, can you tell me a little bit about it? Amanda: The minge cluster! Or maybe let’s rather say, la grappe the original word in Swedish was fitt klase, in French it is grappe de chatte. This is a little spicy brooch used to make boring trousers or tights look better, when you don’t feel like wearing a dress. This is a rather happy jewelry to be used for happy moments or for moments you would like to become happy. Julie: If the history of dream and awake were a story you were telling to a child, how would you tell it? Once upon a time in a dream, a naked girl awoke in a bin, She took a golden sewing thing, threads the needle then begin, Stitching blankets rugs and scrubs, making water into wine, Dresses then comes flying out, people start to twist and shout, For the girl had turned back time, without committing any crime.

Brooding, dense and hypnotic, David Michôd’s feature debut, Animal Kingdom, opening Friday, enters the viewer’s bloodstream quietly, then completely, and leaves a concussive aftershock. Based loosely on real events in the crime world of Michôd’s native Melbourne, Australia, the story of one particular (fictional) thieving family unfolds in lurid detail against a throbbing thicket of sound created by Sam Petty. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival early this year it claimed the Jury’s top prize and performances by the intensely menacing Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn, and by newcomer James Frecheville haven’t stopped collecting laurels ever since. And, oh yeah, the Aussie star Guy Pearce is amazing too. We sat down with the breakout director to talk about myth, mafia and what to do next. Chris: The film feels to me like a mythic saga—Greek, tragic, epic. Is that the way you intended it? David: Yeah. I wanted to make a crime film and I wanted to make one of substance. Something weighty. I didn’t want to make a crime film that would disappear into the back shelves of DVD stores. I didn’t want to make something that was small and a little bit thrilling but ultimately unsubstantial. I wanted to make something of scale and classic, if not austere, and kind of terrifying at the same time. Chris: Easier said then done. But it does resonate that way. It feels arch without the camp of, say, Tarantino or Guy Ritchie—both of whom you’ve pointed out as making the other kind of crime film. David: I’m always at pains to make clear that my desire not to make a film like a Tarantino film is not at all about me not liking his films. I love them. I just felt like—especially in Australia, in the Australian milieu—I wanted to make something that took itself very seriously. Chris: It is operatic. I mean, you are into Godfather territory here—those slo-mo sequences with the absolutely killer sound design are just chilling. Did those elements, the heightened, lyrical moments come during post or was that all drawn in? David: Yeah. That stuff was quite—there was a lot of stuff that came alive in post—but that stuff was always the intention. I made a short that was in Sundance in 2008 that was kind of a style reference for Animal Kingdom in a way. I had at that time been having a lot of meetings with people, trying to get Animal Kingdom happening and I was describing in these meetings a crime film I hoped would be both very dangerous and raw and violent and yet poetic a beautiful at the same time. People either didn’t know what I was talking about or they didn’t believe I could do it. And so I made Crossbow to give a sense of that world—a seedy, dangerous world with dangerous people—but represented in a strangely beautiful way. Chris: The young guy, our sort of cipher for this experience does in a way take a classic character arc—from near catatonic apathy to action, but there is something else at work here, as if the fabric of the family is the story—again as in a Greek saga. David: The story, and certainly J’s story, is a very simple one. It’s a story about a young man, aimless and emotionally immature as so many young men are, letting his faith be determined by all of the forces and people around him, and coming to realize that, for his own survival, he needs to be the engineer of his own destiny. In the process it is also about a young man forming a moral compass in a morally upside-down world. What does it mean to be good in a bad world. Chris: It is horrifying. He is almost inert in the first half of the movie and the audience kind of bleeds through him into the scenes. It is a great empathetic draw, his stillness. David: Funny how some people—I came across this as I was writing it, the classic cinema template—think you need to have a central character who is somehow driving the story. In the course of the years I was writing the film a couple of times I tried to generate a character of that nature and every time it felt so inauthentic to me. It didn’t in any way mirror my experience of teenagers, specifically teenage boys, who are in a way defined by their inability to drive their lives forward. They find themselves dealing with whatever situation they find themselves in and also are so emotionally immature that they don’t know how to properly express themselves either and that can appear as a strange blankness that can appear dumb but is simply the external manifestation of a rich bubbling inner world that hasn’t found a way to express itself. Chris: Then there is this context—this crime world that doesn’t smack of artifice. These aren’t cartoon villains. The whole movie plays as genuine. David: I think it’s about—I think this is the work of all good cinema—making the characters feel authentically human. And in the criminal terrain they are still human they just live in a world where the stakes are much higher. Dangerously marginal lives which their human traits can manifest more extremely but at the core they have human frailties, human strengths. Chris: These are desperate characters. David: There is a lot of confusion. In a lot of ways I made a film about human confusion. All of these characters aren’t sure about what is going on around them or how to deal with change. All of them. The criminal family. The cops. And obviously the young man at the middle. Chris: The crafting of suspense, both in the architecture of the film but in every scene is just stellar. Everything feels like a chapter with a growing sense of dread. How did you get such a polish in a first film—especially in a crime film where everything usually errs on the side of efficiency? How did you achieve this slow-burn pace, and maintain it? David: I don’t know. Chris: It’s impressive. David: Thank you. That was the main challenge. Especially in the edit. I had a clear sense of the brooding menace I wanted to run as an undercurrent throughout the film. What I hadn’t counted on was how strong some of the more thriller elements would play. Such that what I had imagined would be a big sprawling crime story with some kind of menacing flavor became in the cut (whilst it is still kind of big and languorous) tighter. Then we suddenly realized—editor Luke Dolan and I—that we were able to build that tension so well (the menace was really palpable at some points) that it wasn’t in our interests to let it sprawl. So it became about finding a balance between the tension and the sprawl. Chris: How? David: You keep chipping away at it. You keep showing it to people. It’s a painful process. To be honest I hated it. Editing taxes me emotionally more than any other part. Chris: More than shooting? David: Shooting’s fun in a way. It’s totally anxiety stricken. You’re living on adrenaline, you’re out in the world, you’ve got a whole crew with you. Chris: Tell me about casting. It would have been so easy to cast Pope as a big Alpha bruiser, but you went in the opposite direction and it ends up making him more wicked. He scared the shit out of me. But also with J—how do you find a first timer and get him to not act? David: In a way the two central pillars of the thing to me were Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn and I wrote their characters for them. And I know what you mean about Ben and I could tell that was how some people were reading the character in the script—they’d see some kind of tattooed Alpha in that Pope character. And I always knew I wanted Ben because he doesn’t need the muscles or the tattoos, he’s just a force of nature. He’s this wildly charismatic, captivating, if not intimidating, personality. And we were very specific when it got time to talk about it during preproduction that we didn’t want Pope to have tattoos. He doesn’t need to advertise his toughness. What was frightening about him was all in his brain. It was challenging but fun building that character with Ben, this character who was scary in ways even he didn’t understand. We wanted him to look like he’d been dressed by his mother. His jeans are too big for him. He’s got bad shoes, a shirt from another era and a bad haircut—there is nothing aesthetic going on. Chris: How long was rehearsal? David: We had a couple of weeks. With the kids it was just about getting them comfortable, comfortable with each other, comfortable with the other actors, comfortable on set, comfortable with all this as work. With Jacki who is a very experienced theatre actor who has a very rigorous work ethic. She would come with questions, want to get the scenes up on their feet. And then you have something like Guy Pierce who didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse but never wanted to get the scenes up but just wanted to talk. We talked in detail about character. I think it was him trying to get a sense of the movie I wanted to make. On another level I think he was just sussing me out, getting a sense whether when he walked on to the set cold if he could trust my direction. With Ben we realized, after a few frustrating days of rehearsal, that we needed a lot of work, we needed to map the whole character beat by beat. Chris: Kudos. It is really great. But, where do you go from here? David: It’s really odd, that. I could not have hoped for this whole thing to unfold any differently, from the reception at Sundance, to the Grand Jury prize, to the way it opened at home, to some the reviews, I couldn’t ask for anything more. But it feels as though it has created a whole list of future problems. Chris: I think that is a good problem to have. David: It is a quality problem.