The spring issue of the Yale Review is out now, with contributions by Tiana Reid, Audrey Wollen, Mona Oraby, Isabella Hammad, Guadalupe Nettel, and more.
On March 19th, 4Columns magazine is hosting “Manifesto,” a free event at KGB bar in New York City. The six participants—Brian Dillon, Johanna Fateman, Ciarán Finlayson, Harmony Holiday, Alex Kitnick, and Emily LaBarge—will present their visions for the future of criticism, debate these visions, and nominate critical words and phrases to be retired from the critical vocabulary for good. The event will be moderated by 4Columns senior editor Ania Szremski.
At the Paris Review, Max Weiss interviews the Palestinian novelist and essayist Adania Shibli, whose short story “Camouflage” opens the journal’s winter issue. Weiss translated the story, which is excerpted from Shibli’s novel in progress. On her role in the translation of her work, Shibli says: “I hope to maintain the presence of Arabic breathing within the text—though not by leaving Arabic words untranslated, which I find to be Orientalizing. Arabized terms often fail to be dissociated from a colonial encounter, but I do try to maintain an invisible connection with the language by working with a translator.”
Triple Canopy has published Tobi Haslett’s talk “On a Painting by Hamishi Farah,” which was given on February 1st as part of the Transmediale festival. Upon learning that the painting was a portrait of Berlin’s culture senator and member of the Christian Democratic Union Joe Chialo—who in 2023 attempted to require recipients of public arts funding to effectively agree not to criticize Israel—the Transmediale curators declined to hang the painting. “I suspect that the real reason this painting cannot be exhibited properly is the same reason Farah thought to paint it in the first place, and the reason its true subject had to be concealed from the curators of this festival: that Joe Chialo represents the cutting edge of culture-industry repression in this country, which is not exactly known these days for its openness, permissiveness, good faith, or good taste.”
When Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less than Zero was published in 1985, it inspired praise, outrage, distress (New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that it was “one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time”). Now, to celebrate the novel’s fortieth anniversary, Vintage is issuing a new edition with an introduction by Rachel Kushner.