At Kirkus, Olivia Laing discusses her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, and why she chose the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich as its central figure. “I’ve had a career of writing about difficult and complicated people,” Laing says, “and Reich takes the biscuit. He had been a sexual liberationist, he’d been an anti-fascist. He had this visionary idea in the 1920s of uniting the ideas of Freud and Marx; he thought that trauma was encapsulated in the body, that it lived in the body. And at the same time, he saw our bodies as agents of change.”
Olivia Laing Conjures Up Complicated and Difficult People
Whither the last typewriter?
Historian Suzanne Fischer on nostalgic artifacts and the changing use for typewriters from work objects to elements of decor.
Turkish … Delight?
C.S. Lewis’s greatest fiction of all time was convincing American children that turkish delight was going to taste good. Here are a couple pieces on food and writing to sate your unjustly titillated appetite.
His and Hers
The novelist and essayist T Cooper has a new book out, Real Man Adventures, that reflects on his life as a trans man. At Slate, Amanda Hess gives a comprehensive take on the memoir.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Straub; Phillips; Berkhout; Visser-Maessen; Ulman; Gaiman
Out this week: Modern Lovers by Emma Straub; Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips; The Gallery of Lost Species by Nina Berkhout; Robert Parris Moses by Laura Visser-Maessen; Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman; and The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
“The year we killed our teacher”
What’s the only thing nicer than new fiction by Hilary Mantel? New fiction by Hilary Mantel that you can read for free. At the LRB, check out the entirety of her latest, “Kinsella in His Hole.”
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Jake Adam York (1972 – 2012)
Deeply saddened to hear news that Jake Adam York died today. York published three critically acclaimed poetry collections between 2005 and 2010: Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings, and Persons Unknown as well as an additional work of literary history The Architecture of Address. Much of his work is available online as well, such as his poems “Vigil” and “Self-Portrait as Superman.” Edit: The Kenyon Review has uploaded three recordings of York reading his poetry. These are highly recommended as well.
UC Press suspends New California Poetry series
Alison Mudditt, director of The University of California Press, has announced the suspension of the New California Poetry series due to state budget cuts and the challenges posed to “our industry and markets which (not unlike the newspaper industry!) require us to rethink and retool to remain a vibrant and relevant voice in the digital age.”
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