Poet Janice Mirikitani, a former Poet Laureate of San Francisco and cofounder of the social-service nonprofit Glide, has died at the age of eighty. When she was a child, Mirikitani spent time in a US internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The author of multiple poetry collection, Mirikitani also edited anthologies, and coauthored a nonfiction book about her work with Glide. San Francisco mayor London Breed remembered Mirikitani as “one of our city’s true lights. . . . She was a visionary, a revolutionary artist and the very embodiment of San Francisco’s compassionate spirit.”
At Slate, Elliot Hannon writes about female journalists in Afghanistan who continue to report after the Taliban’s takeover of the nation.
For Harper’s Magazine, Christian Lorentzen reviews Atticus Lish’s new novel, The War for Gloria. Lorentzen writes that stylistically, Lish’s new novel holds up well compared with Lish’s 2014 breakthrough, Preparation for the Next Life. But overall, The War for Gloria is “an unstable hybrid, unbearably poignant until it turns improbably pulpy, pitting a set of intricate characters against a pair of villains who seem to have escaped from a caricature factory managed by Charles Dickens in Hell.”
In his newsletter Sweater Weather, Brandon Taylor writes about the connection between shopping for furniture and the state of contemporary fiction. Perusing design Instagram, Taylor writes, “I’d feel a little frisson of pleasure not dissimilar from how I feel when I read the icy, detached novel about contemporary life that has flourished in the last few years especially. The same little thrill that you get from Kate Zambreno or Jenny Offill or Sheila Heti, whose fictions are sheared of the typical trappings of fiction and which seem to exist in a curious, catalogue-adjacent liminal space. That’s the thing about a catalogue. It approaches the poetic in its sublimity. The way that catalogue copy works at the twin levels of signifier and descriptor. The literal and the vibe, so to speak. Catalogue fiction. Ikea realism.”
At the New York Review of Books, Nicole Rudick considers writer and archivist Nathalie Léger’s triptych of critical biographies: Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden, and The White Dress. Léger’s method, Rudick writes, is one of false starts and biographical tangles: “We can look and look and see nothing of a person; we can examine them minutely, intently, and miss them completely. What do we know of anyone? What do we know of ourselves? Which parts of ourselves do we show, and of those parts, which are performance? Which are we coerced into playing?” For more on Léger, see Leslie Jamison’s review in the Winter 2021 issue of Bookforum.