For the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman interviews Patricia Lockwood (No One Is Talking About This) about her influences, humor, and “the genre of submarine books.” Lockwood also describes her process for writing book reviews: “I’ll just be there with my notebook, this giant Moleskine, writing everything down. And, I don’t know, feeling a very, very strong sense of communion with a book. I don’t think most people write that way or read that way, but I also think that most people come out of their reading with some sense of the basic plot of the book, which I don’t always. If it’s a mystery, I don’t know who did it.”
For Jewish Currents, Linda Kinstler writes about the perilous situation in Ukraine, as 190,000 Russian troops surround the country. Kinstler observes, “A Russian invasion of Ukraine is not ‘imminent,’ as the White House suggested, because it has already occurred; the war has already arrived, and 14,000 Ukrainians have already died in the fight.”
In the new edition of 4Columns, Sasha Frere-Jones reviews a study of hip-hop pioneer J Dilla. Frere-Jones admires the book, Dilla Time, because author Dan Charnas and unpacks exactly what made Dilla’s sense of rhythm so radical. Frere-Jones writes, “Each sound you hear lands a few milliseconds before or after where an element would usually fall. Dilla pulls your attention toward the atoms of a song and then asks your body to negotiate the gaps between them.” For more on Dilla Time, see Harmony Holiday’s review in a preview of the next issue of Bookforum.
At Harper’s Bazaar, Faith Ringgold—the ninety-one-year-old artist whose first major retrospective exhibition is now on view at the New Museum—reflects on how she came to make her quilt paintings, and ponders her legacy.
In a recent Substack post, Lincoln Michel considers the book blurb: “While blurbs might suck, it doesn’t follow that blurbs are unimportant or don’t work.”
The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction interview with Joy Williams, conducted by Paul Winner, is unpaywalled this week. Williams discusses stories (“What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade.”) and confirms that when she left home, her family gave her two copies of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.