Abdulrazak Gurnah. Photo: Amrei-Marie. Patrick Blanchfield writes for the New Republic about Freud’s last days in Vienna: “If Freud himself, so attuned to the dark undercurrents of human behavior and so critical of the false security offered by our wishful illusions, proved unable to think clearly even as his country became unrecognizable around him and as nightmare after nightmare became real, what are our chances now?” Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks with V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell for the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives, was published this month.  In The Nation,

James Benning. Photo: Manfred Werner/Tsui/Wikimedia Commons Online at the New York Review of Books, Blair McClendon writes about California, American spectacle, and James Benning’s installations and films, which “are perhaps best categorized as landscapes.” Benning’s latest film, The United States of America, is a remake of a 1975 work, and seems to offer portraits of each state—but all the footage was shot in California. Of his home state, McClendon writes: “California is a brutal place playing at paradise. Benning looks long enough at the land to see its pretensions and its realities.”  The latest issue of New Left Review

Michelle Goldberg In the latest issue of Lux magazine, an interview with Robin D. G. Kelley about Black anti-work politics. Asked about his definition of anti-work, Kelley says, “I don’t mean resistance to work or labor per se. I mean resistance to wage labor alienation, proletarianization, and misery. Fighting the routinization of work means fighting a division of labor that isn’t our own.”   For Alta magazine, Jim Ruland considers Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice. Ruland writes that while the book has often been panned by critics, it offers a “skeleton key” to the elusive author’s work. He travels

Lucy Sante The Washington Post is reviving Book World, its stand-alone book section. As the paper’s critic Ron Charles reports: “Starting Sept. 25, the Sunday paper will contain a separate broadsheet section devoted entirely to book reviews and literary features. The move coincides with the addition of new staff members, including Book World’s new editor in chief, John Williams, who starts Sept. 6.” The TikTok Book Club, #BookTok, will now be sponsored by Amazon.  At Jacobin, Ryan Napier reviews Michel Houellebecq’s latest, Interventions 2020, a grab bag of letters, interviews, and essays about figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and

Still from White Noise. Photo: Netflix. A trailer for Noah Bambauch’s film adaptation of Don DelIllo’s 1985 novel White Noise is out now. The Netflix movie will star Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle and will open at the Venice International Film Festival on August 31.   At the Paris Review Daily, Haley Mlotek curses her least favorite month: “In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom.”  For Vox, Constance Grady argues that Penguin Random House and Simon Schuster used incompetence as

Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod. In Frieze, Jennifer Kabat reviews two new memoirs: Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare and Édouard Louis’s A Woman’s Battles and Transformations. Kabat writes, “Both writers have fraught relationships with their mothers, neither of whom had a choice about being a parent, nor were they particularly good at it. The collateral damage is outlined in both narratives.”   The New York Times profiles writer and publicist Kaitlin Phillips. In the piece, she shares her PR philosophy: “So much of press is like, they teach you safe press. I’m incredibly into, like, edging.” For Bookforum, Phillips has written about

Christopher Hitchens. Photo: © Christian Witkin In the latest episode of the Harper’s Magazine podcast, Christian Lorentzen discusses the evolution of critic Christopher Hitchens’s work with host Violet Lucca and guests Luke Savage and Maureen Tkacik. In the August issue of Harper’s, Lorentzen reviewed a new collection of Hitchens’s London Review of Books pieces.  Members of the New York Times Union have conducted a report on racial disparities in performance review scores, which affect the size of bonuses employees receive. The study, whose dataset starts from 2018, shows that “being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high score

Elvia Wilk. Photo: Nina Subin The Atlantic has published Daniel Smith’s “A Recently Divorced Man Dreams Uneasily in His New Apartment,” the first of five very-short stories “displaying the virtue of lightness” that the magazine will share this month.  For the New Yorker, novelist and Dorothy editor Danielle Dutton writes about Ann Quin’s 1972 novel, Tripticks. The book, which Dutton describes as the author’s homage to her birth-control pills, is Quin’s “most pointedly satirical work,” taking up the techniques and mascismo of the Beats. “Yet, just as the novel is a parodic takedown of nineteen-sixties American culture that both

Claire-Louise Bennett. Photo: © Mark Walsh For Harper’s Magazine, Claire-Louise Bennett—author of Checkout 19 and Pond—meditates on artist Louise Bourgeois: “The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she once said. It is customarily supposed that pain is a great catalyst for creativity, since pain produces an overflow of emotion that must surely galvanize artistic expression. But pain is more than and less than emotional excess. It is a grueling existential experience and is therefore one of the most difficult human situations to express.”    At the Paris Review Daily, staff recommend Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple,

Poets & Writers has a profile of Namwali Serpell ahead of the publication of her new novel, The Furrows. The book is a winding tale of grief and uncertainty centered on a missing child, which Serpell began writing in 2008. In 2020, she was in the process of a big revision when the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by police occured. As she explains, “Those two events didn’t change the content of what I was writing, but they changed the urgency of what I was trying to get at in two senses: confronting death and confronting the racial

Tess Gunty. Photo: Lauren Alexandra Photography PEN America is hosting a reading in solidarity with Salman Rushdie on Friday morning at the New York Public Library. Reginald Dwayne Betts, Hari Kunzru, Gay Talese, Colum McCann and more will read from Rushdie’s body of work. The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman reflects on how top executives testifying in the Penguin Random House antitrust trial have presented their industry: “Despite their aura of idealistic adventure, publishing executives have shown themselves to be fiercely risk-averse. In a capricious market, they’ve leaned on hundred-year-old inventory instead of nourishing the books that might become tomorrow’s

Elaine Castillo. Photo © Elaine Castillo.  The New York Times reports on the testimony of Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh, who took the stand yesterday in the trial that will determine whether the publisher will be allowed to acquire Simon Schuster.  At the New Yorker, read an excerpt from staff writer Hua Hsu’s new memoir Stay True, which will be published next month. In the excerpt, Hsu recalls faxing his father, who was working in Taiwan as Hsu was attending high school in California. Hsu writes that, at times, “We were like two strangers trading small talk at

Amitava Kumar In the Indian Express, novelist and essayist Amitava Kumar writes an open letter to Hadi Matar, the man who has been arrested for stabbing Salman Rushdie: “Listen, you are young and I understand you will only be sitting in a room doing nothing for many, many years. I hope you will find time to read this letter. The world learned last week that you are 24. The man you tried to kill is 75. I don’t know about you but when I was 24, I was reading that man’s writings with great devotion. You might even say

Salman Rushdie. Photo: Syrie Moskowitz Author Salman Rushdie was attacked this morning in western New York, where he was about to give a lecture, the Associated Press reports. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is banned in Iran, and the country’s late leader issued a fatwa calling for his death in 1989. AP’s Joshua Goodman writes that “​​Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.” Online at n+1, Jenny Brown, the author of Birth Strike,

Matthew Salesses The Paris Review Daily is bringing back their “Culture Diary” column. Today, the site posted a dispatch from Los Angeles by Maya Binyam. Of Elif Batuman’s new novel, Binyam writes, “Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man ‘saying “Uh, uh” in the background.’” For The Guardian, Janina Ramirez lists ten books about

Isaac Fitzgerald. Photo: Remi Morawski At the Paris Review, read Annalena Benini’s interview with the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, who died in June. They discuss Cavalli’s friendship with Elsa Morante, her affinity for domestic objects, and Cavalli’s first poems, which she wrote after seeing Kim Novak in the 1955 film Picnic: “I fell in love, went home, fasted for a week in protest because I’d never be able to know Kim Novak—and after the fast I wrote two poems. I found them recently while going through some old notebooks. One is titled ‘If Kim Novak were to die.’”  Katy

Sheila Heti (photo: Margaux Williamson) Hulu has optioned Sheila Heti’s forthcoming novel, Alphabetical Diaries. For the novel, Heti took a decade’s worth of diaries, placed each sentence in alphabetical order (based on the first word of the sentence), and then cut until a narrative took shape. The book will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023. Hulu hopes to turn the novel into a TV series.  The New York Times profiles poet Carmen Giménez, who starts her role as the publisher and executive director of Graywolf Press today. Giménez remembers looking at poetry chapbooks and zines at

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton At the New Yorker, Joy Williams looks at the photographs of Curran Hatleberg, which were taken mostly in northern Florida: “The atmosphere is weary, post-consumerish. No one seems to possess anything. The men and boys are often shirtless, the cars cannibalized. There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey.” Post45 Contemporaries has collected a series of appreciations for historian and activist Mike Davis’s work, with contributions by Madeline Lane-McKinley, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Eric Avila, and Megan Tusler.

Lynne Tillman, New York City, 2013. Writer and editor John H. Maher has been live tweeting the antitrust trial that will determine whether Penguin Random House will be allowed to acquire Simon Schuster. Today was day four of a trial that two days ago featured Stephen King testifying for the government’s case. The Los Angeles Times rounds up what you need to know about the proposed merger.   In her New York Times “By the Book” interview, Lynne Tillman discusses Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies (1943), noting “it was her only novel, and for that she’s not taught. Her stories

Mohsin Hamid. Photo: © Jillian Edelstein Pulitzer Prize–winning author Heather Ann Thompson is in the midst of a lawsuit to keep New York prisons from banning her book on the 1971 Attica prison revolt. The state attorney general’s office has proposed dismissing the suit, as prison officials have decided to lift the ban under the condition that two pages of Blood in the Water, which display a map of the prison, will be excised before reaching incarcerated readers. Thompson has noted that censorship at Attica by correctional officers was one of the factors that sparked the 1971 uprising.   Stephen