The comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb has died at age seventy-four. Beginning in the early 1970s, Kominsky-Crumb pioneered an unfiltered and personal style that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to depict in art. Kominsky-Crumb frequently collaborated with her husband, Robert Crumb, over the years, and the couple also made work with their daughter, Sophie. The family were recently featured in a joint exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in Paris. In February of this year, Kominsky-Crumb told Sarah Moroz in Artforum: “I’m not a facile artist, I’m a tortured artist. I don’t censor myself at all: The story comes out, I have to let it come out.”
A group of writers and editors led by Madeleine Schwartz are launching The Dial, which aims to be “the world’s little magazine,” taking its name from the storied magazine founded in 1840. The Dial will release its first monthly online issue in January.
The Washington Post is ending its Sunday Review, the standalone print magazine, and laying off the publication’s ten employees.
The new issue of the New York Review of Books is out now, with Tobi Haslett on John Edgar Wideman, Merve Emre on Roald Dahl, Stephen Greenblatt on the Tudors, Marilynne Robinson on scripture and science, and more.
Online at The Point, Max Lawton recounts going on a US tour with the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, whose work Lawton has translated for Dalkey Archive Press and New York Review Books. When Lawton tells Sorokin he might write about the tour, Sorokin says, “You’ll have to explain how I bought a George Foreman grill to make my own steaks in the hotel room, setting it up right there on the bed. You see… I had to find a more economical way to eat this beautiful American meat.”