Paper Trail

Ottessa Moshfegh on being liked; Reading Fernando Pessoa in quarantine


Ottessa Moshfegh. Photo: Larry D. Moore

At the New York Times, Lauren Christensen talks to Ottessa Moshfegh about loss, the need to be liked, and her upcoming book, Death in Her Hands. “People don’t want to talk about how they relate to a character’s more unsavory qualities,” she said of readers’ reactions to her novels, “so they’re like, ‘God, she was really gross.’ Everybody’s so obsessed with being liked.”

The New York Public Library is listing the top books that New Yorkers are checking out online during the pandemic. Favorite titles include Sally Rooney’s Normal People, James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tale.

At the Paris Review, Eddie Grace makes the case for reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet during quarantine. “It’s been hard these days for me to find meaning; we are storytelling creatures, but I seem to have lost the plot,” he writes. “In The Book of Disquiet, though, there seems thus far to be no plot to lose. There are characters and events, but I can find no thread to follow, no causes and effects. Every fragment feels self-contained, its connections to those on either side tenuous at best.”

Kiese Laymon remembers Kimarlee Nguyen, his former student and a budding writer who recently died from coronavirus at the age of thirty-three. Nguyen was an English teacher at Brooklyn Latin and had been at work on a novel. “Most people are reserved in their personality, but in their writing everything busts out,” he said. “Kim was the opposite. She would tell stories so it appeared that nothing had happened. But, oh, man, so much was happening.” Nguyen’s obituary is part of the New York Times’s new series, “Those We’ve Lost,” which remembers victims of the pandemic.

The Verge’s Zoe Schiffer examines Medium’s inconsistent editing standards and how they allow the spread of misinformation. While the website now hosts online magazines with fact checkers and editors, it still allows self-published articles to be posted without oversight, leading to confusion. “The decision to curate some content — to hire professional journalists and promote verified articles — has made it harder to tell fact from fiction on the platform,” she writes. “While user-generated pieces now have a warning at the top telling users the content isn’t fact-checked, they look otherwise identical to those written by medical experts or reporters. In some ways, this is the promise of Medium: to make the work of amateurs look professional.”