After moving to Brooklyn, Sabine Heinlein spent a year trying to learn English, a task which left the native German speaker “close to aphasic” after a few months. Eventually, she met up with another recent immigrant, who enlisted her for help in a sprawling art project: a collection of words from each language spoken in New York City. At The Hairpin, she writes about her experience.
Tip of the Tongue
Return of the Literary Magazine
“If the novel is struggling in this new environment, what of literary magazines? Long extinct? The opposite: literary magazines are getting popular again.” Guardian documents the resurgence of the literary magazine, thanks to the internet.
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Koestler the Dangerous Intellectual
The Times Literary Supplement profiles Darkness at Noon author Arthur Koestler as an iconic “Dangerous Intellectual”: “‘My analysis … is: one third genius, one third blackguard and one third lunatic …’”
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Censorship in China
“We have documented cases of at least 47 writers and journalists currently imprisoned in China. The average sentence for a writer is eight years in prison, and some sentences are even harsher.” PEN American Writers send a letter to Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, in response to his visit to the U.S. We have a few pieces about censorship to pair with it.
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Georges Perec also remembers
George Perec‘s I Remember, a series of aphoristic memories modeled after Joe Brainard’s volume of the same name, are finally making their way into English translation. The Paris Review has an excerpt. “I remember that Stendhal liked spinach… I remember that one of the first decisions that de Gaulle took on coming to power was to abolish the belt worn with jackets in the military.”
Tuesday New Release Day
The big debut this week is Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Also of interest is a new collection of essays by Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number. The much delayed U.S. edition of a controversial 2009 Booker longlister, Ed O’Loughlin’s Not Untrue and Not Unkind, is now out. As is this intriguing curiosity: Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, which purports to be the “first complete English translation of Nietzsche’s poetry.”
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Tales of a Onetime Construction Worker
Last week, Emily Gould recommended Nell Zink in her Year of Reading piece, extolling Zink’s novel The Wallcreepers as a “funny, profane, [and] deeply weird book.” At The Paris Review Daily, Matthew Jakubowski interviews the author, who talks about living in Germany, reading too much Kafka and writing for Jonathan Franzen.
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Good Riddance
Recommended reading: Jason Arthur bids “Good Riddance to the Good-Bye-To-New-York Essay” for The Rumpus. Pair with Eryn Loeb‘s review of Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and our own Elizabeth Minkel‘s account of rereading Didion‘s original “Goodbye to All That.”