As Rachel Syme points out, the person who made the Spotify playlist of every song mentioned in Patti Smith’s Just Kids deserves a free drink or two.
Just Kids Playlist
On The Making of The Blues Brothers
“‘We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots,’ [Dan] Aykroyd says.”
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Jewish America
Saul Bellow on being Jewish in America, and Lorin Stein, in an interview, discusses contemporary Jewish writers.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cantor; Wilson; Spivack; Chirbes; Sparks; Williams
Out this week: Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor; Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson; Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack; On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes; The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks; and Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Touring The Third Hotel
“I thought quite a lot about the vocabulary of tourism, the kinds of desires that vocabulary seems designed to ignite, and the promises made, and how those promises change or vanish altogether depending on who you are.” The Paris Review interviews Laura van den Berg about writing, tourism, and her new novel, The Third Hotel. From our archives: our 2015 interview with van den Berg.
An Examination of the Trauma Plot
The ways we write about trauma have evolved. "In a world infatuated with victimhood," Parul Sehgal writes for The New Yorker, "has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage?"
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Inside the Mind of a Book Critic
“A book critic working today must contend with a world in which more diverse voices are heard and the traditional gatekeepers have less power to enforce conformity.” LitHub interviewed Kate Tuttle, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, about literary criticism. Read our own Emily St. John Mandel on bad reviews.