“How do you tell a story about a relationship that remains, at heart, stable and that has no endpoint toward which to go?” For Lapham’s Quarterly, B. D. McClay considers the friendship plot: “In both children’s literature and in stories for adults, friendship repeatedly emerges as something oppressively close, exclusive of others, jealous of growth; friendship stories are about rifts and endings, drawing a final curtain over the lost past.”
The Believer has published an English translation of an interview with the late Uruguayan bookseller, author, and cartoonist Mario Levrero, in which Levrero interviews himself and accuses the interviewer of trying to “pigeonhole” him. “I don’t recognize fixed ideas,” the author said. “One of my great pleasures is realising my own mistakes. I don’t trust ideas; they’re like a cage.”
Before her death in 2018 at age eighty-eight, Ursula K. Le Guin started blogging. The site went offline after her death, but the full archives are available again. In the first entry, posted in 2010, Le Guin writes that she was inspired to start a weblog by José Saramago, who began writing online at age eighty-five. At the beginning, she was not without her reservations: “I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage.”
The Point magazine has posted an annotated TOC as a preview of their new issue, which will be out soon.
At the Paris Review Daily, staff picks for the week, including books by Nicole Claveloux and Reverend Roger Williams and music by Life without Buildings and Matt Mitchell.
Now online: the first episode of Bookforum’s new video series, No Wrong Answers, an unscripted conversation between two writers. In this episode, Anuk Arudpragasam and Megha Majumdar discussed Arudpragasam’s new novel A Passage North, the connection between philosophy and writing, and why train journeys are such rich material for authors.