Walter Abish, the experimental novelist, poet, and author of the acclaimed 1980 novel How German Is It, has died at the age of ninety. “My work invites interpretation,” Abish said in 2004. “To provide explanations is to inhibit the reader’s interaction. Often to explain is to explain away.”
In an essay for Criterion, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Billy Wilder’s 1994 film Double Indemnity, the power of the femme fatale, and “the suggestion of the racialized other” in noir films. For more on Wilder, see A. S. Hamrah’s essay on his life and work in the Spring 2022 issue of Bookforum.
Emily Gould is chronicling her family’s apartment search for Curbed: “It’s commonplace that New Yorkers only want to talk about real estate, but in my experience, this isn’t true. Sometimes they want to talk about things that are wholly unrelated to housing. I, unfortunately, have lost the ability to talk about anything else ever since learning in late February—while I was sick with COVID!—that my landlords were putting my apartment up for sale.”
PEN America has announced its 2022 Emerging Voices Fellows. Program director Jared Jackson said of this year’s class: “This is a stunning cohort of Emerging Voices Fellows, whose work reveals truths about subjects from Black feminism, displacement, and Asian-American identity to parenting, the Naga diaspora, and LGBTQ themes.”
Casey Plett interviews Imogen Binnie about her novel Nevada, which was first published nine years ago and is now being reissued by MCD. Binnie notes, “Nevada . . . doesn’t feel like a book that would come out in 2022, and it’s led to conversations. A lot of people have been interested in what it was like being trans in 2008, when the book is set. Or even before then. I’m surprised readers with no investment in trans stuff are having such a positive experience with it.”