Poet, artist, and activist John Giorno, author of Subduing Demons in America, died on Friday. Giorno, who collaborated with a number of writers including William S. Burroughs, was the “star” of Andy Warhol’s 1963 five-hour silent film Sleep. Giorno started the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984. In 1968, he started “Dial-a-Poem”: Anyone calling the number 641-793-8122 would hear a recording of poems by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and others. The number still works today.
“The most overrated books almost all emerged simultaneously from a single genre: magic realism. I can’t stand it. I always found ordinary realism quite magic enough.” Clive James offers up his favorite—and least favorite—books.
This week, Pamela Dorman, head of the eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, bought the debut novel A Kindness for a reported high six figures. The novel, by a Maine-based lawyer writing under the pseudonym Regan Rose, is “about an accusation of date rape that unmoors a New England family,” and explores “elements of mystery, tragedy, doubt, and justice.”
John Le Carré, now eighty-seven, is publishing his twenty-fifth novel, Agent Running in the Field. At The Guardian, author John Banville talks with Le Carré about his career as a spy, his fiction, and Brexit.
At his performance last night at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Nick Cave cited Rae Armantrout and Sharon Olds as inspirations to his work, which led us to a recent list of his favorite poets.
Happy birthday, Hannah Arendt.