“It’s the people that keep you going back”

Jeff Vandermeer‘s Southern Reach trilogy: a genuinely weird work of ecological fiction, a hyper-object, or a strangely beautiful “glimpse of a whole that’s, by its nature, unknowable”? Joshua Rothman argues for all three in a review for The New Yorker. For more from Vandermeer himself, check out his Millions interview with Richard House, author of The Kills.

Matthew Jakubowski’s “experimental review” of Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue is unlike anything you’ve read in months, and I promise you that.

“Elizabeth Hardwick, a formidable feminist in a different key, declared, ‘I don’t know what happened. She got swept too far. She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.’” On the (difficult) art and activism of Adrienne Rich.

Recommended listening: Marilynne Robinson talks with NPR about about her latest novel, Lila, which we covered in our “Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview” and which Leslie Jamison recently reviewed for The Atlantic.

Year in Reading alum Catie Disabato sits down with 0s&1s to discuss “using criticism as fuel, ambition, comparisons to Ayn Rand, the power of pop stars, happiness norms & more.” You could also read our review of her latest work, The Ghost Network.

“Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.” Michael Thomsen makes the case that dating writers is a bad idea.