An Interview with Rilke

“The way (Yeats) puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between.”  The Paris Review has published a brief, fascinating letter written by Samuel Beckett to his aunt Cissie Sinclair containing an original poem and some positive criticism of the painter Jack B. Yeats. Top it off with this essay by Elizabeth Winkler about language, style, and translation–and how any of that might help to make sense of Beckett’s convoluted legacy.

It almost sounds too terrifying to be true. Your book is reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and he opens with: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book" (and it gets worse from there, and deservedly so). It happened to David Mamet and his new book The Secret Knowledge.

The Rake takes note of the New Yorker's particularly dark reading of Goodnight Moon.Iain Hollingshead gamely responds to being awarded the "Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award" for his debut novel Twentysomething, which included such turns of phrase as "everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks."With a few celebs getting in trouble for racist outbursts this year Malcolm Gladwell (ever thoughtful) comes up with a way to figure out who's really being offensive and who's just dumb.Maud points to a new blog from one of my favorite publishers, NYRB Press.Dozens of year end-lists floating around here and elsewhere, but I always take special note of Jonathan Yardley's year-end column because it is always thoughtful and sometimes surprising.To do (as soon as I have the time): listen to the Bat Segundo Show that features Edward P. Jones.

Read a lot of Granta? Want to hang out with Brazilians? The magazine is hosting a number of events to celebrate its cool new collection.