At the Paris Review, Jaqueline Feldman looks into how Parisian bookshops are preparing for next summer’s Olympics. “With a diving suit and helmet,” said one bookseller, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport.”
For The Nation, J. Howard Rosier interviews Adam Shatz about his recent book Writers and Missionaries, which collects essays on Kamel Daoud, Edward Said, Michel Houellebecq, Roland Barthes, and Richard Wright, among others. In their conversation, Shatz compares his subjects to musicians: “They’re trying to achieve some kind of transcendence.”
Becca Rothfeld responds to Caitlin Doherty’s “A Feminist Style” at the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. “Though I agree with Doherty that much of today’s feminist thinking is uninspired, I do not accept her diagnosis of what ails it. She writes that ‘a focus on the negative experiences of womanhood—however broadly and ecumenically defined—will yield a negative feminism: participation credentialled on the basis of suffering.’ But isn’t an articulation of collective suffering the basis for any successful mass movement?”
An excerpt from Doppelganger, Naomi Klein’s forthcoming book about being confused for Naomi Wolf and “our moment of collective vertigo,” is up at Vanity Fair.
Parapraxis magazine and the Psychosocial Foundation have announced the next installment of their online seminar series, “The Wish.” Meeting for nine sessions from September through November, presenters such as Jacqueline Rose, Amber Jamilla Musser, Anna Kornbluh, Akshi Singh will “looks to the wish, both in its psychoanalytic and revolutionary contexts, moving between the psychosocial and political questions of yearning, horizon, utopia, desire, and sex.” The seminars include a reading list and discussion groups along with the presentations. You can register here for a sliding-scale fee.
On Thursday, Skylight Books in Los Angeles will host Maya Binyam in conversation with Kate Wolf. Binyam will discuss her new novel Hangman, which is about exile and diaspora. In the New Yorker, Julian Lucas called the book “a slim, stark, and captivatingly enigmatic début.”