“Like reading, love works in roughly the same way every time, but the details of any given case are irreducibly particular, and it’s in the details that everything happens.” Lidija Haas on Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot. (You could also read our review by Virginia Marshall.)
Boiled Down
Olga Tokarczuk on the Coherent Cosmos of Leonora Carrington
Olga Tokarczuk reflects on the "wild metaphysics" of Leonora Carrington’s 1974 surrealist novel, The Hearing Trumpet.
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Yes, Strange
Just when you thought I wouldn’t make you sad about Alan Rickman again, here he is starring in a film adaptation of one of Samuel Beckett’s short plays. In case you missed it last time, these recordings of Rickman reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy will surely generate some feelings.
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Show Up, Don’t Show Up
“You’ll engage with your advisor in a free-form dialogue about essential skills such as plotting your next career, pacing your financial ruin, structuring TV binge-watching during optimal writing hours, and characterizing all of this as ‘learning how to fail.'” Hey, this new low-competency MFA from the fictitious Half Mast College sounds pretty great. Here’s our own Hannah Gersen on why she has foregone the MFA route entirely.
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“The Snowy Day” Gets a Stamp Series
Iconic illustrations from Ezra Jack Keats‘ The Snowy Day will become part of the United States Postal Service’s “Forever” series. The four stamps will feature Peter, the little brown boy in his famous red snowsuit, in various states of play. See also: our own Edan Lepucki on children’s books and their grown-up counterparts.
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One Yakuza Group Starts its Own Magazine
Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo, the largest Yakuza faction, has decided to start its own magazine focused on “haiku poetry, articles on the innocent pursuit of angling and entreaties to its readers to perform good works” among other things. Related: recently photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai.