The winners of the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night. Among the awardees are Jenn Shapland in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography catagory for My Autobiography of Carson McCullors, Pamela Sneed in Lesbian Poetry for Funeral Diva, and Zeyn Joukhadar in Transgender Fiction for The Thirty Names of Night. In addition, special honors were given to Sarah Gerard, Brontez Purnell, T Kira Madden, and others.
At the London Review of Books, Joanne O’Leary writes about Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham. Mabel Loomis Todd had an affair with Emily Dickinson’s brother and devoted herself to transcribing, editing, and promoting the poet’s work after her death. Mired in family scandal and accusation of editorial malpractice, Mabel and Millicent are due for a reconsideration. It hasn’t been easy, as O’Leary observes: “Even as one attempts a dispassionate account of the editing and circulation of the poems, it’s impossible not to be drawn back into the private lives of those involved: feuds, double-crossings, divided loyalties.”
The new issue of the Paris Review is out now with fiction by Anuk Arudpragasam, Kenan Orhan, and Adania Shibli; interviews with Roz Chast and Arundhati Roy; poems by Kaveh Akbar, Marianne Boruch, Ishion Hutchinson, and Ada Limón; and more.
For the New York Review of Books, Max Nelson considers the work of filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, and Nick Pinkerton’s new monograph on Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). Nelson writes about the careful intimacy of Tsai’s films, and the director’s long-term working relationship with actor Lee Kang-sheng. Nelson discusses Tsai’s films as part of a larger project: “Just as their characters hover between isolation and intimacy, so the movies themselves at once coalesce around an individual artistic sensibility and undercut it. They have come to seem like installments in a self-conscious performance about the conditions of auteur filmmaking itself.”
Tomorrow at 9pm EDT, New Directions will celebrate their eighty-fifth anniversary. The press was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin, after Ezra Pound advised him to “do something useful” upon graduating from Harvard. Forrest Gander will emcee the celebration, which will feature writers Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Rosmarie Waldrop, and other guests.