“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.
Crystallized Political Commitments
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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Move It
“These days, nothing says amateur hour quite like an alphabetical bookshelf.” Sloane Crosley does not have packing tips for you, though she does have some book recommendations.
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A Sordid Affair
Has there ever been a decent television show about book publishing? Not yet. Liam O’Brien at Melville House explains how Showtime’s The Affair is the best one we’ve got–and by “best,” he means impossible and hilariously unrealistic.
“I run around my house with bacon on my head and Sam Tanenhaus is sending me notes.”
Ron Charles, the WaPo’s fiction critic and the witty and winning originator of the “video book review” genre, gets profiled in Publishers Weekly.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hallberg; McCann; Michel; Roberts; Hickam; Childress; Gass
Out this week: City on Fire by our own Garth Risk Hallberg (whom we interviewed yesterday); Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann; Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel; The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts; Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam; And West is West by Ron Childress; and Eyes by William H. Gass. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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