For The Nation, Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary republication of her book Scenes of Subjection. Hartman discusses her unexpected path to writing the book: “I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery.” At the New Yorker, you can read an adapted version of Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s foreword to the new edition of the 1997 book.
At the Sewanee Review, the poet Carl Phillips shares an excerpt from his book My Trade Is Mystery about talent, ambition, and stamina: “‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ goes the line from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Stamina’s what happens between those two sentences.”
Brandon Taylor, the author of the novel Real Life and the story collection Filthy Animals, recently gave a talk on “character vapor” in fiction, which he has adapted as a newsletter post. “I think we must return our characters to their bodies,” Taylor writes. “And we must do so not through just slapping random physical facts or bits of information into our stories. We must do as all great fiction demands and select. Embody. Modulate physic distance. Eschew the narrated for the experiential. We must bring our characters close. And we must stay when they grow cold and uncomfortable.”
Brigitte Giraud has won the Prix Goncourt for her novel Living Fast, which explores the circumstances of her former partner’s death in a 1999 motorcycle accident. Giraud’s books have not yet been published in English.
Next Monday at Symphony Space in New York City, Hilton Als will launch his new memoir My Pinup: A Paean to Prince.