This week’s must-read essay is Parul Sehgal’s profile of critic Jacqueline Rose. Rose’s new book of collected essays, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sehgal writes, “Lacan said that analysis did not take place in the present tense but in the future perfect—a way of looking back at what one will have become—and it is here that Rose seemed to dwell during our time together. ‘You’ll want to tease this out,’ she would note, of a particular detail. Or, ‘There’s a whole other story there, which I think is crucial for you.’ Holding up her finger, with its bright-blue polish: ‘Now, this is something you can use.’” For more on The Plague, subscribe to Bookforum now to get our summer issue, in which Sarah Nicole Prickett writes about Rose, psychoanalysis, and mourning.
In his newsletter, The Chatner, Daniel M. Lavery writes about the peculiar writer’s block that comes over him when he’s asked to write a blurb: “I know better than to call something a tour-de-force, or unflinching, or worse yet a slim volume of surprising and uncommon power, but aside from being able to mark out the most obvious pitfalls like Scylla and Charybdis, I’m completely lost.”
In a review of Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, for the Boston Review, Anna Krauthamer asks, “Can we still write about trauma?” Johnson writes, “Much ink has been spilled about the antagonistic relationship between language and trauma. Yet it has always seemed that repair is the wilder, more fleeting and precarious antagonist to language.”
For n+1, Kathryn Winner writes her second dispatch on the Women’s World Cup. Winner writes, “The stadiums are larger, fuller, and more color-coordinated. In place of goofy individual fans pointing at themselves on the jumbotron there is the immense, baroscopic noise of the crowd: roaring, booing, thickly unified chanting.” For more on the World Cup, check out Moira Donegan’s essay in Bookforum’s sports issue from 2022. Donegan writes about how the 1999 US women’s team represented an apotheosis of 1990s pop feminism: “In hindsight, the optimistic gender politics of the ’90s can seem cruel. The girl-power rhetoric of the time did little to acknowledge the reality that sexism would look very different for Black girls than for white ones. Nor did it grapple with the failures within the institutions that those girls were supposed to climb to the top of.”
At The Dial, contributors give their recommended readings for the summer.