“What we call them is entirely irrelevant: emigrants, migrants, refugees, exiles—we all know to whom we refer. Refugeedom is our common cultural meme. It is the story with which Christian civilization begins. We bear the imprint of the furious index finger God used to banish Adam and Eve from Eden.” Dubravka Ugrešić writes about displacement and the refugee crisis for the Literary Hub. Pair with Arnon Grunberg’s Millions essay on Ugrešić’s legacy.
The Book of Exodus
Coetzee on Murray
Millions favorite J. M. Coetzee analyzes “the angry genius” of Les Murray for The New York Review of Books.
Beastie Boys Books and Beastie Boys Parks
Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) have signed on to write a Beastie Boys memoir for Spiegel & Grau. The book is scheduled to publish in 2015. However if you need your Beastie fix now, you can head on over to Brooklyn’s Palmetto Playground tomorrow for its renaming ceremony. Its new name? Why, Adam Yauch (MCA) Park, of course.
Standing on the Bridge of Grief
Over at Catapult, Benjamin Wood writes about his eulogy for his grandfather, which led to his writing of The Ecliptic. As he puts it, “Or maybe, in this time of grieving, I was thinking only with my heart until my head began to listen. Today, it seems as though the entirety of The Ecliptic was held within my consciousness before I ever glimpsed a piece of it, and grief was what enabled me to notice.” Pair with Nagihan Haliloğlu’s Millions review of the novel.
Scientology Revealed
Janet Reitman, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, spent five years researching Inside Scientology, which is reviewed here by Brook Wilensky-Lanford for The San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier this year, ‘Million Dollar Baby‘-screenwriter Paul Haggis spoke with Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker about L. Ron Hubbard‘s religion.