For the New Yorker, Frank Guan writes about Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, The Nineties: “More rerun than revisionism, Klosterman’s history takes its stand against the millennial urge to reassess the nineties (or the generation claiming ownership of them) in the harsh light of later events. If Gen X disengagement and ironic fence-sitting were brought up short by Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and the rise of social media, he wants to preserve the nineties as a safe space for his cohort.”
In the latest installment of Artforum and Bookforum’s Artists and Writers series, novelist Dennis Cooper (author of the new novel I Wished) speaks with video artist Ryan Trecartin.
Last week, the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to ban teaching Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus. In response, Scott Denham, a professor at Davidson College, is offering an online course on the book, free to all McMinn County high school students.
The new issue of The Drift is out now, with pieces on the TED Talk, the state of the American essay, an interview with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, fiction by Lucie Elven, James Yeh, and more.
Ryan Ruby reviews a new collection of unfinished long poems by the late, great John Ashbery: “A frequent scenario in Ashbery’s poetry is a voyage that does not go according to plan, either because it fails to start, because it is interrupted, or because someone gets lost along the way or forgets where they wanted to go. That by missing the turnoff the speaker simultaneously undercuts and enacts the conclusion to his argument is precisely the point. As with the difficulty of telling the difference between love and death, what we’re dealing with here is a paradox—and a very old one, at that. Ashbery’s strategy, as always, was to occupy both sides of it.”
Oprah Daily pays tribute to eight authors who are “forces for good,” including Lan Samantha Chang, Meghan O’Rourke, Imani Perry, and Kathryn Schulz.