In most portrayals of Cold War espionage, both Communist and capitalist spies appear wedded to their respective ideologies. Yet real spies, as the FBI knows, often have more nebulous motivations. In the Times Book Review, Ben MacIntyre reads the latest by Ha Jin, which centers on a Chinese spy embedded in suburban Virginia.
In a Foreign Land
Help Her, Miss Manners
In the pages of the Washington Post, the venerable Miss Manners responds to an English department secretary who feels “besieged by fringe ‘academics’ who are very adamant that we are part of a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare.”
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Anthology of African LGBT Writing
Poet Abayomi Animashaun has issued a call for “poems by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals living in Africa and in the Diaspora.” Submissions “of high merit” will be considered for a forthcoming anthology.
Sehgal and Adichie in Conversation
In the introduction to her interview with the author, the inimitable Parul Sehgal described Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, as “a thrilling and risky piece of writing that takes on taboos, shatters pieties, and combines forthright prose, subversive humor, and a ripping good story.” If that doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what will.
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Kazuo Ishiguro on the Joys of Repetition
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses his newest book, Klara and the Sun, and how it echoes themes he has often explored in his previous work.
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Novelist of ideas
Millions contributor Charles Finch writes about Norman Rush, author of Mortals and Mating, “There is the constant possibility that the next sentence is about to tell us something new.” Pair with our own review.
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No Recourse to Steel
It’s safe to say that Jorge Louis Borges could have lectured on anything from watching paint dry to waiting in line at the DMV and the end result would still have been magnificent. Here he is teaching a little Buddhism 101, with an accompanying lecture by his close friend and UC-Berkeley professor Amelia Barili.
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Iowa’s Free Online Poetry Workshop
A new MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is scheduled to begin on June 28. “How Writers Write Poetry” is free and open to the public, and it will feature craft talks from poets such as Robert Hass and Kwame Dawes. A fiction-writing course is also scheduled for September. (Related: Read how several Iowa MFA students describe a typical day in the program.)
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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.