“This doesn’t really tell you what he was like. I say what we did together, that he helped me, what I think he liked. I don’t know how to say what he was like. I loved him.” For The Los Angeles Review of Books, an interview with Lynne Tillman on her relationship with art historian, critic, and theorist Craig Owens, who died 29 years ago at the age of 39. Tillman discusses Owens’s idea of writing “alongside,” not “about,” art, adding, “I don’t expect answers from art. It doesn’t speak as people or other animals do…I’m speaking and looking ‘at’ or ‘to’ an artwork; I am not explaining it, not talking ‘about’ it, but addressing myself ‘to’ it.”
Lynne Tillman Doesn’t Write About Art
Deep In Yakuza Territory
Photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai, a Yakuza group headquartered on the Kyushu island of Japan. “My mental note to myself,” says Jue, “was ‘once I step foot into their property, anything can happen.’”
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Simone de Beauvoir’s Abandoned Novel Gets a Second Life
Three decades after Simone de Beauvoir's death, her abandoned novel, The Inseparables, will be published, thanks to de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
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Olivia Laing Conjures Up Complicated and Difficult People
Olivia Laing discusses her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, and why she chose the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich as its central figure.
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Citations Needed
Internet trivia addicts, today is your lucky day. The Houghton Library at Harvard is hiring a Wikipedian in Residence.
Lahiri on Salter
As part of a Paris Review series of essays celebrating James Salter, Jhumpa Lahiri writes “For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years.”
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MAN Asian Literary Prize Winner Announced
Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin has been named the winner of this year’s MAN Asian Literary Prize. Learn about the seven-book shortlist in our extensive write-up from January.
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