Paper Trail

Sheila Heti discusses her new novel with Sarah Ruhl


Sheila Heti. Photo: Margaux Williamson

At The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior, the author of All Joy and No Fun, has written about the end of the friendship between fiction writer Elisa Albert (After Birth) and poet and Fence editor Rebecca Wolff (The King): “It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from. Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage.”

Christian Lorentzen has started a Substack. You can read his inaugural dispatch—about French noir author Jean-Patrick Manchette—here.

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation—named after the legendary editor of the New York Review of Books—has called for submissions for its “Work in Progress” grants: “Anglophone writers of any nationality may apply for up to $10,000 to support long-form essays in the fields of literary criticism, arts writing, political analysis, and/or social reportage.”

The Washington Post is looking for a “dynamic and innovative journalist to lead its Climate & Environment department.”

The actor and director Griffin Dunne has sold an untitled memoir to Penguin Press. According to the publisher, Dunne—the nephew of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and a close friend of Carrie Fisher—will write about “the successes and disappointments and the wit and wildness in his multigenerational family of larger-than-life characters.”

Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7pm Eastern time, Sheila Heti will discuss her new novel, Pure Colour, with essayist, playwright, and poet Sarah Ruhl (100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write). You can register for the virtual event, which will be cohosted by the booksellers McNally Jackson, Politics & Prose, Charis Books, Literati Bookstore, and White Whale Bookstore, here.