TODAY: In 1965, novelist Chang-Rae Lee is born.
- “I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands.” Roxane Gay on the recently announced HBO series “Confederate,” to be helmed by the (white, male) creators of Game of Thrones. | The New York Times
- There’s so much storytelling in girlhood: An interview with Jenny Zhang. | Office
- “During a trip to California I convinced myself that a stranger’s damp, blue eyes had originally belonged to my dad.” Samantha Hunt on mourning and organ donation. | Work In Progress
- “It would be gauche and inappropriate to compare Nguyen’s patience to that of a sleeper agent, but the parallel practically draws itself.” Josephine Livingstone profiles 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen. | The New Republic
- The New York Times chief book critic for the past four decades, Michiko Kakutani, has announced her retirement; read and her highlights and best burns. | The New York Times, The Cut
- “I should note that I am what is termed a cartographic specialist in the art history world—and a dilettante in the world of cartographers.” An excerpt from Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives. | Granta
- Hillary Clinton’s collection of essays has evolved into a “full memoir” entitled What Happened. | The Guardian
- “I became an author in New York, but it was like a book party that never ended.” An interview with Danzy Senna. | Vulture
- John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel have been working to find and save copies of the 19th century black-owned newspaper the Wilmington Daily Record—with the help of students at two North Carolina middle schools. | Wilmington Star News
- On the “relative invisibility of cultural and literary representations of queer rural life” and the writing (and relationship) of Sylvia Towsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. | Hazlitt
- Springsteen and Dylan speak to our current condition, and so do Boethius and Sappho: On Michael Robbins’s Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music and “advanced-pop criticism.” | The New Yorker
- It is a truth universally acknowledged that we can’t stop mashing up “it is a truth universally acknowledged”: a linguist explains the enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s most famous first line. | NPR
- “I want the material to be felt and mobilized, and not in a clinical premeditated way.” An interview with Harmony Holiday. | BOMB Magazine
- How Walter Benjamin’s fictions reveal a version of the critic “not always anxious or melancholic” but “often exuberant.” | The Hedgehog Review
Mothers who leave their children: On the pain of motherless nights · The most-anthologized poems of the last 25 years · Trump’s shameful, cruel ban on people like me: A president’s attempt to normalize hate · Michael Chabon, Lindy West, Jim Shepard and more on how to be a writer · An interview with Ocean Vuong, reluctant optimist · Reading aloud with others is more important than you think: A brief history of social reading · How the witchcraft of Clarice Lispector saved Scott Esposito’s life · Paul Lynch on what the fictional past reveals of the real-life present · How Patti Smith brought rock ‘n’ roll to New York poetry · 90 poets on the legendary John Ashbery, in honor of his 90th birthday
This week on Book Marks:
“I eat men like air”: A 1966 review of Sylvia Plath’s posthumously published poetry collection, Ariel · NPR calls Scott McClanahan’s autofictional portrait of the destruction of a marriage “a primal scream of a book” Joan Didion’s surgical prose and crushing fatalism in Play It As It Lays · “Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men”: On Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends · “Simply put, the best Twilight Zone episode you never saw”: Stephen King on The Leftovers · One of her earliest New York Times book reviews, Michiko Kakutani on Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road · Comic novels, darkly fantastical short story collections, and harrowing memoirs all feature among our best-reviewed books of the week
