One night in 1937, Avies Platt decided to attend a meeting of the Sex Education Society, held at London’s Grafton Galleries. When the meeting was over, she ended up driving none other than W.B. Yeats to the afterparty. In the LRB, she recalls her encounter with greatness.
A Terrible Beauty
Refusing to be Silenced
The Brooklyn Rail's InTranslation section has launched a new poetry series, 100 Refutations. Created by author and translator Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., the series will feature a daily poem "from one of the countries recently denigrated by the president of the United States." Pair with: The Millions' Surviving Trump column.
Finish Your Novel
Sunil Yapa shares his ideas on how to find the time and money to finish a novel. Pair with Janet Potter's Millions guide on finding the perfect title for that book in your drawer.
The Bolaño Myth: Wiggity Wiggity Wack?
Over at Conversational Reading, Scott covers Horaçio Castellanos Moya's dis of imperialist publishing suckas who be pimpin' "The Bolaño myth."
A Fan’s Lament
“We tether ourselves to others as a path not taken, a dream unfulfilled. A lesson unlearned, a responsibility unmet. We mourn idols as ourselves because even that unachieved road must end.” Paul Taunton has written a heartfelt Hazlitt essay on Frederick Exley, Frank Gifford, and passionate idolatry. Exley’s cult favorite A Fan’s Notes, published in 1988, is a fictional memoir that centers on a quasi-obsession with Gifford, who passed away earlier this week at the age of eighty-four.
Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?
Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.
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Congratulations, Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is the recipient of the 2016 Hadada Award from The Paris Review, a lifetime-achievement award which is presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” We brought you a bit on Davis just yesterday.
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The Billionaire is Dead…
At long last, a viable alternative to Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson has entered the NYC mayoral race. This candidate's "zero tolerance anti-hipster policy" is certainly worth a look.
No Lie
Everybody lies, or so the saying goes. But how long have we known this was true? At Slate, Katy Waldman reviews a new history of lying, delving into the knotty philosophy behind efforts to excuse deceit. You could also read our own Edan Lepucki and Janet Potter on deceit as it pertains to Gone Girl.