Critic Christian Lorentzen is launching a Substack newsletter sometime this week.
The New York Review of Books has posted an interview with contributor Laura Marsh: “For me, it’s always been the feeling, after finishing a book or a film, of needing to know more and to talk to people about it—to understand why you like something, or why it bothered you.”
Thomas Beard, the cofounder of the film and arts space Light Industries, has opened a once-a-week pop-up book store, which draws from his extensive book collection. “This isn’t really a business—it’s a slow-motion garage sale,” he says. “When the books are gone, I’ll close up shop.”
Todd Gitlin—author of many books, and a longtime critic for the New York Review of Books and other publications—has died at seventy-nine.
LitHub has printed the English version of a 2018 interview with New York Tyrant founder and publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, which originally ran in Vanity Fair Italia. “I’ve always felt like a great imposter, a fake, a charlatan,” said DiTrapano, who went on to become a fierce supporter of new writers. “When I started out, I knew fuck all of how you went about editing and publishing a book. I simply started doing it and it came to me naturally.” Recently, the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts was launched, which will help fulfill the editor’s “dream of creating a community for writers and artists of all disciplines to develop new work in residency on the grounds of his family’s ancestral home, Villa DiTrapano, in Sezze Romano, a hilltop village located in the capital region of Lazio, Italy, halfway between Rome and Naples.”
In the wake of a Tennessee county’s ban on teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus in public schools, the graphic novelist revisits the long history of banning comics, and how it inspired him as an artist. “There were literally parents and clergymen gathering comic books from kids and burning them in bonfires,” Spiegelman said of the Comics Code of the 1950s. “We as cartoonists of that generation loved the salacious, raucous, uninhibited expression of id. . . . We wanted to topple every article of the Comics Code if we could.”
Tonight at 5pm Eastern time, you can catch the latest installment of the excellent Popular Music Books in Process Series: Dan Charnas will discuss Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, his new study of J Dilla, with Kelley Louise Carter.