At Interview magazine, Sloane Crosley talks about her new novel, Cult Classic, with Lauren Oyler. Describing one of the book’s characters, Crosley notes, “We’re all victims of too much self-analysis, and we can collapse under the weight of the perfect decision, which is something that happens to her.”
For Vanity Fair, Charlotte Klein details the turmoil at the Washington Post, as internal disputes spilled out onto Twitter, a high-profile reporter was suspended, another journalist called out the paper’s sexism and lack of accountability, and star writer Taylor Lorenz publicly blamed a “miscommunication with an editor” for a mistake in one of her stories, writing “I did not write the line and was not aware it was inserted.” Klein writes that much of the controversy is the result of the Post’s outdated social-media policy, and that “the flurry of tweets and Slack messages, as well as staff assurances and apologies, suggests there isn’t an effective channel for raising concerns about inappropriate behavior at the Post, or at least not one staff are utilizing.”
Novelist Edmund White, the author of a 1998 Proust biography, reviews Christopher Prendergast’s Living and Dying with Marcel Proust and considers ways to navigate the “Proust-industrial complex” one-hundred years after the author’s death. Prendergast was the executive editor of an ambitious new translation of In Search of Lost Time, and White notes the way he uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the novel to illuminate every corner of Proust’s life.
Issue five of Socrates on the Beach is out now with fiction and essays by Mircea Cărtărescu, Ceridwen Hall, Adam Kosan, Garielle Lutz, and newly translated work by Robert Musil.