Yiyun Li. Photo: © Phillippe Matsas Alexandra Kleeman profiles novelist Yiyun Li for the New York Times Magazine, and writes about Li’s latest novel, The Book of Goose, which will be published next week. Among the questions Kleeman poses is one borrowed from a character in Li’s 2019 novel Where Reasons End: “What do you do all day?” Over email, Li explains why she tries to stay “midthought” throughout the day: “I don’t think writing is the beginning of the thought, the beginning happens before we start typing the first word; and usually the thought doesn’t end when a

Jean-Luc Godard. Photo: Gary Stevens/Wikimedia Commons In tribute to filmmaker and montage master Jean-Luc Godard, who died yesterday in Switzerland by assisted suicide, Leo Robson has “assembled some of my favourite statements made by and about the director over the past seventy years.” The Paris Review has shared a partial transcript from a 1979 conversation between Godard and the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. In a remembrance published online at n+1, Blair McClendon writes: “I never have much to say to giants. It was enough to know that he was out there—smoking a cigar, whining, planning—while I was elsewhere

Javier Marías Javier Marías has died at age seventy. The Spanish writer, best known for his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, was the author of more than fifteen novels, including Thus Bad Begins, and The Infatuations.  In 2018, Marías said in an interview with Garth Risk Hallberg, “A professor goes to give his lesson after 40 years . . . and the teacher knows he will give a good lesson, or at least a decent one. And he will do it with ease. And the carpenter who’s been making tables for 40 years or whatever knows he will succeed with

Hari Kunzru. Photo: Clayton Cubitt The New Yorker Festival tickets are now on sale. On Saturday, October 8, Andrew Solomon will talk with Rachel Aviv, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Hari Kunzru will talk with Parul Sehgal, and Elif Batuman and Gary Shteyngart will talk with Molly Fischer. On Sunday, October 9, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will talk with Deborah Treisman.  Emma Straub has been posting tributes to her father, the award-winning horror writer Peter Straub, who died last week. Among the photos here is a handwritten list of poets that Peter recommended when Emma opened her Brooklyn bookstore

Yoko Tawada. Photo: Nina Subin  Sarah Jones offers a remembrance of activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week, at Intelligencer. Jones first encountered Ehrenreich’s work when her mother was reading Nickel and Dimed. “What astonished me early about Ehrenreich’s work wasn’t just that she, as an individual, cared about the working poor, but that she could get others to do the same. From my vantage as the daughter of a precarious family, it looked like Ehrenreich had performed a magic trick. With time, though, I came to understand something about how she managed it. Ehrenreich’s power as

Donna Tartt. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/Little, Brown For the New Statesman, Nick Burns reconsiders Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History on its thirtieth anniversary. Reflecting on its continuing appeal, Burns notes that “Tartt’s characters take the world of Waugh’s Brideshead as a model for their tastes, attire, manner of speaking, and The Secret History offers an invitation into a select society devoted to this kind of re-enactment.”    The Root rounds up a list of books by Black authors to look forward to this month. Lit Hub suggests twenty-two novels to read this fall.  Community Bookstore is hosting a virtual event

NoViolet Bulawayo. © NyeLynTho The 2022 shortlist for the Booker Prize has been announced. Among the nominees are Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Percival Everett’s The Trees, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker.  Jay Caspian Kang, author of The Loneliest Americans, is joining the New Yorker as a staff column writer. Most recently, Kang contributed to the opinion section of the New York Times in a twice-weekly newsletter.  Real Life, an online magazine about living with technology founded in 2016, has lost funding and

Barbara Ehrenreich. Photo: Stephen Voss. Barbara Ehrenreich, an activist, journalist, and author of more than twenty books, had died at age eighty-one. In 2012, she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a program to support independent journalists and foster stories about inequality and poverty. Discussing the impetus for the project in a 2020 New Yorker interview with Jia Tolentino, Ehrenreich recalls writing stories for the New York Times Sunday Review about the recession, a project that she lost money on: “I thought, What kind of bullshit is this? Only rich people can write about poverty? That’s when the idea of

Rachel Aviv. Photo: Rose Lichter-Marck New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv will discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, tomorrow with Daniel Bergner in a panel at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. Several other events with the author have also been announced.  At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson looks at how the advice of best-selling personal finance books compares to economic theory. Thompson talked with James Choi, a Yale professor who studied fifty such books and recently published the paper “Popular Personal Financial Advice Versus the Professors.” Choi found that

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