Patrick Blanchfield writes for the New Republic about Freud’s last days in Vienna: “If Freud himself, so attuned to the dark undercurrents of human behavior and so critical of the false security offered by our wishful illusions, proved unable to think clearly even as his country became unrecognizable around him and as nightmare after nightmare became real, what are our chances now?”
Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks with V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell for the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives, was published this month.
In The Nation, an interview with Hugh Ryan about his new book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison.
For The Baffler, Anthony Domestico writes about Robert Crawford’s new book chronicling T. S. Eliot’s life after “The Waste Land.” In his review, Domestico points out that the poet had a lot of life left to live after his masterwork, which could seem anticlimactic. Domestico observes, “There are different ways a literary biographer might deal with this issue: rush through the last decades at a breakneck pace, say, or dilate upon the later, less celebrated work. Crawford employs neither strategy.”
On Tuesday, September 6th, Powell’s Books in Portland is hosting an online event with Gary Shteyngart and Carolyn Kellogg to discuss Shteyngart’s novel Our Country Friends, which is coming out in paperback.