(Photo by Kate Lord)

Bushwick finally has its own murder-mystery novel—and it’s a good one, too! Journalist Andrea Bartz, who established herself as a scholar of hipsterdom as co-author of mock-guidebook Stuff Hipsters Hate, has deftly placed a group of plaid-shirt-wearing characters in a whodunit set at the intersection of the media and art worlds. Set between 2008-2009 and the present day, her novel The Lost Night follows literary essayist turned head fact-checker Lindsay Bach as she tries to piece together what happened the night her impossibly beautiful and charismatic former best friend Edie was found dead by apparent suicide; the “Calhoun Lofts,” a dump-meets-arts-haven in Bushwick, is its sandbox-like backdrop.

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(Photos: Zach Filkoff)

Thrill-seekers rejoice! There’s a new high-stakes psychological immersive play in town, and the subject is none other than death and mortality. The Mortality Machine, by Sinking Ship Creations, takes place in a Canal Street basement where, as the story goes, five people died in 2014 as a consequence of a botched medical experiment. Soon after, the facility was closed off and the evidence was buried under countless legal documents. Five years later, a lawyer manages to get access to the basement, which sets the story in motion as participants investigate what exactly happened.

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(Illustrations from Art World by Matthew Thurber)

Matthew Thurber’s new graphic novel, Art Comic, is absurdist, surreal and a little bit slapstick. After all, it follows a group of Cooper Union graduates— and their professor, and a group of idealistic pigs, and some aliens, and two procreating sex robots— as they try to master the whole “how to be an artist” thing. At the author’s request, though, please don’t call it satire.

“A satire felt too light to explain how upset I am about a lot of these tendencies in art, about how serious the book is for me,” he told Bedford + Bowery the day after Thursday’s book launch at Desert Island Comics in Williamsburg. “This is beyond poking fun, this is a systematic problem.” While satire is cathartic, there’s no release for Thurber after he’s done explaining himself in the book.

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Ever wish for more adult-oriented anime that doesn’t veer into hentai territory? Sometimes, you’re just not in the mood for candy-colored kink, you know?

Thankfully, there’s a new booze-themed anime from Masaaki Yuasa, known to western audiences for the series Devilman Crybaby and for his jarring merfolk movie Lu Over The Wall. His new one, The Night is Short, Walk On Girl, is a bacchanal in the streets of Kyoto, during which a group of university students and older tagalongs embark on surreal quests like finding a rare children’s book and setting up an itinerant theater production featuring a king, a princess and an inflatable sex doll. (Okay, there is some kink here.)

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(Photos: Angelica Frey)

I was so ready to start this review with: “I can’t believe people paid money for this and there are already plenty of sold-out time slots.”

I approached Color Factory —an interactive color-centric exhibition that debuted in San Francisco last summer and got a revamp for its New York iteration—armed with a strong dose of prejudice: My reaction to recent immersive, installation-based experiences such as the Dream Machine and Egg House can be summed up with the word “eh.” But at the end of my walkthrough of The Color Factory, I was as giddy as when I finally made it through Alice’s Curious Labyrinth at EuroDisney in the ’90s.

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