It’s turning into Speedboat Week here, so why not spend the weekend with some of Renata Adler‘s most renowned nonfiction? Her controversial reassessment of Pauline Kael (featuring “A Limitless Capacity to Inquire,” one of the best found poems you’ll ever read) is at the NYRB, and her deep dive into l’affaire Lewinski can be found at the L.A. Times. Interestingly, as Sarah Weinman points out, Adler’s 2001 book about the Bilderberg Conferences still hasn’t seen the light of day. (“Who suppresses manuscripts? We do!”)
More Adler
“Unfilmable” Novel to be Filmed
Salman Rushdie’s “unfilmable” novel Midnight’s Children, winner of the “Booker of Bookers,” is apparently coming to the big screen.
●
●
Long Memory
When Damien Searls first read W.G. Sebald, he thought the German writer was uniquely good at factoring historical circumstance into his thinking. Sebald’s unyielding reminders of the horrors of the past were a nice corrective to the feel-good pablums of the ‘90s. But reading Sebald now, Searls thinks something has changed. What happened? The world went online. (Related: Greg Walklin on Sebald’s A Place in the Country.)
The Man and His Image
Recommended Reading: Can we separate Knausgaard the writer from Knausgaard the narrator?
●
●
Beginner’s Luck
“Our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix,” the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris. On how Voltaire outsmarted one of the earliest lotteries and made a fortune. Also check out how Goethe became an amateur auction theorist.
●
●
Britain’s Illuminated Manuscripts
Illuminated manuscripts such as bestiaries and bibles, prayer books and propaganda, histories and stories, each owned and annotated by kings and queens, go on display at the British Library in London. (“The Genius of Illumination”, November 11-March 13)
●
●
Enigmatic, Disturbing Sirens
Marina Warner reviews the “enigmatic and brief” and somewhat disturbing “The Professor and the Siren” for The Paris Review. As luck would have it, our own Sonya Chung reviewed the same story for The Millions.