New York magazine book critic Andrea Long Chu discusses her collection of reviews and essays with Grace Byron for the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Some of the essays in Authority are polemics. I wouldn’t say the whole book is. Getting to test the mettle of an idea is, to me, part of the nature of writing. It can hold complex ideas and I can construct something very complicated and propulsive. I can build a whole machine and drive it into someone. Polemical writing is kind of built to do that.”
The forthcoming issue of Granta magazine will collect contributors’ remembrances of their late mentors and friends, including Renata Adler on Hannah Arendt, Aatish Taseer on V. S. Naipaul, Tao Lin on Giancarlo DiTrapano, and more.
At the Paris Review, read Rachel Kushner on Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, which Kushner read as a teenager in 1985, the year it came out: “I have a distinct memory that when I got to the end, I threw my copy out a window. The effect of this book on me required a drastic measure, apparently.”
B. D. McClay is writing a four-part series on speculative fiction at The Point. Read the first installment here: “I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction.”
The Booker Prize shortlist includes Slovej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I, Vincent Delecrois’s Small Boat, Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, and Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat.