Online at n+1, Ava Kofman writes a remembrance of Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist who died earlier this month. “In a sense, Latour’s career was a matter of insisting that he meant most of the things he said, however unlikely they might sound,” Kofman writes. “Still, he occasionally found himself ‘squashed’ by the number of activities he’d thrown himself into. The CV he posted on his personal website was 112 pages long. His philosophical project didn’t lend itself to paraphrase, but one theme he returned to again and again was that reality, as we know it, is always vulnerable to a ‘full-scale battle of interpretations.’”
For the New Yorker, Julian Lucas surveys Nobel Laureate Abdulrazek Gurnah’s fiction: “A novelist in the old-fashioned school of fateful separations and buried family secrets, he is interested not only in the experience of displacement but also in its myriad causes: debt, shame, misguided ambition, and, especially, the toxic entanglement of kinship and dependence.”
Criterion Collection has laid off 20 percent of its staff across several departments, including editorial, in a “reorganization” of the company.
In this week’s 4Columns, artist and critic Hannah Black considers the late Diane Arbus’s retrospective show at David Zwirner gallery, which revisits the photographer’s famous 1972 exhibition. “If I wanted to be unkind,” Black notes, “I could draw a clear line from Arbus to the inanities of something like early 2000s Vice magazine, with its comparable attachment to pointing at freaks from a safe distance.” But, “for all their exaggerated ugliness, their dorky gawking at ordinary life, Arbus’s portraits express real admiration and care for all that she knows she cannot be.”
A Public Space’s group reading of Bette Howland’s W-3 is underway, led by novelist Lynn Steger Strong. You can read an introduction to Howland’s work by Rumaan Alam online at Bookforum, as well as a review of W-3 by Sarah Chihaya.