This week has brought new issues of The Quarterly Conversation (including considerations of Herta Müller, Per Petterson, and Jonathan Swift); Lapham’s Quarterly (The Arts & Letters issue, featuring Salman Rushdie); and Triple Canopy (“Hue and Cry”)
From the Newsstand
When A Critic Becomes An Author
Vanity Fair talks to renowned book critic Michiko Kakutani about her debut The Death of Truth and why she decided to become an author.
Open and Shut
The Culturephiles want to put the kibosh on the “open letter” bit. What better way to tackle that than with an open letter.
The Best of the Internet
The Bygone Bureau asked a whole heap of people to write for their annual “Best of the Internet” post, and I was one of them. Come on over to see what I have to say about Ted Berrigan, a Twitter robot, and a certain type of found poetry.
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“David Shields = Canada”
At HTML Giant, Catherine Lacey interviews David Shields, who says that his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, drew material from his stated identity as a “highly self-conscious lab rat.” For more, you can read our own Mark O’Connell’s review of his book in the Times.
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Keep Hope Alive
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
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