“In times of tension it is particularly important to defend what is good, identify what would worsen the status quo, strive for balanced assessments, always hoping for the best, and try to identify and oppose any and all steps toward coercive authoritarianism.” Richard Falk narrates the coup in Turkey at Guernica.
Narrating the Coup
Two Degrees of Fame
The copy of Shakespeare’s works disguised as a Hindu religious text and read by imprisoned Nelson Mandela will go on display for this first time later this summer.
New Wave of Confessions
For The Guardian, Rafia Zakaria writes on the new wave of confessional “feminist” memoirs. As she puts it, “We’re on an uncomfortable tightrope between a bold new dialogue about women and sex, and the monetisation of that conversation by powers that recognise that as a gap in the market.” Pair with this Millions essay on feminist pop anthems.
Keija Pernissen Interview
The Missouri Review‘s Michael Nye sits down for an interview with The Ruins of Us author Keija Parnissen. The book, he says, is his “first must read book of the year.”
Young Adult Fiction’s New Chapter
Another David Foster Wallace Book Out Soon
Yesterday we noted that The Pale King is now available for pre-order. It turns out another new David Foster Wallace book will be out before the long-awaited final novel hits shelves. In December, Columbia University Press will put out Wallace’s undergrad thesis Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. From the publisher description: “Long before he probed the workings of time, human choice, and human frailty in Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant philosophical critique of Richard Taylor’s argument for fatalism. In 1962, Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that humans have no control over the future. Not only did Wallace take issue with Taylor’s method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but he also called out a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument.”