Paper Trail

Reading Anne Carson after a breakup; The NYPL is accepting applications for the Cullman Center Fellowship


Anne Carson. Photo: Peter Smith. 

The summer issue of the Yale Review is out now, with Becca Rothfeld on the merits of high-school debate tournaments, Sarah Chihaya on reading Anne Carson after a breakup, and Terrance Hayes’s review of poet Tim Seibles (told in the form of a board game), and much more.   

The New York Public Library is accepting applications for the 2023–2024 Cullman Center Fellowship. 

At Gawker, Leah Finnegan covers the Twitter infighting at the Washington Post. Finnegan writes, “It’s funny how legacy papers can’t figure out their stance on social media. Their indecisiveness creates a culture of snitching and loserdom.”

For Astra magazine, Sophie Atkinson reads Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Die Eigenschaften ohne Mann (The Qualities Without Man), an online version of the book that contains only adverbs and adjectives. Atkinson speculates about what effect reading the two together could have: “I wonder if The Qualities Without Man might provide a way of drilling to the center of the novel. By rereading the book in adjective form only, I could make sense of it in the same way I might an abstract painting, letting my vision blur and refocus, considering it intuitively rather than analytically.”  

Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton have launched a new podcast, Ursa Short Fiction. Bookforum interviewed Walton in 2021 about her debut novel The Final Revival of Opal & Nev.