Joan Didion has died at age eighty-seven. For Bookforum, Sarah Nichole Prickett reviewed Didion’s South and West in 2017, and Gary Indiana wrote about Blue Nights in 2011.
For the New York Times’s 2021 edition of “The Lives They Lived,” Jane Hu remembers the pioneering author and scholar Lauren Berlant, who died in June. Hu writes that Berlant was always “careful not to moralize. Instead, their work was organized around an abiding generosity and curiosity about the shameful inconsistencies driving people’s interior worlds.”
In the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood reviews Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novel, The Morning Star. Of the Norwegian author’s prose style, Lockwood observes, “At first it feels like you’re being shot with a BB gun full of cat food, but somehow the rhythm takes hold of you. You are a cat, and you’re HUNGRY.”
Irish poet Thomas Kinsella has died at the age of ninety-three. For the Irish Times, poetry editor Gerard Smyth writes, “In reshaping and reinvigorating Irish poetry, and in a life dedicated to that purpose, he has never been afraid to challenge either himself or his readers. Kinsella stands with Joyce as one of the great innovators in modern Irish literature.”
The Columbia Journalism Review talks to Nic Dawes. Dawes is the executive director of The City, a nonprofit news platform in New York.
Niela Orr writes for The Baffler about shopping in a time of constant crisis, and her decision to buy the hoodie that Kanye West made for the Gap: “In buying the hoodie, I ‘pulled a Kanye’ on myself. . . . For a second, I interrupted my own progress. I became pure id—I agitated my ideal self, and poked at my responsible and critical impulses.”