Jamie Hood discusses her book Trauma Plot: A Life—which is out today—with Nicholas Russell at Defector: “I think that the reason it took me 10 years to write Trauma Plot was because rape ultimately seemed to me like a formal problem. Like, I could not figure out how to tell the fucking story.”
In the spring issue of the Paris Review, Hilton Als interviews Margo Jefferson for the journal’s sixth “Art of Criticism” interview. “Black nationalism brought you out of being this timorous, anxious, self-monitoring creature,” Jefferson tells Als. “You could begin to imagine yourself acting out and acting up and sharing strong feelings. Picket lines are very good for that.” Also in the issue: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya gives an “Art of Fiction” interview; new writing by Amie Barrodale, Marie NDiaye, Miriam Toews, Susan Howe, Nasser Rabah, and more.
Lapham’s Quarterly has announced that it will relaunch later this year under the stewardship of Bard College and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.
The recipients of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize include Anne Enright, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Rana Dasgupta, and Sigrid Nunez, among others. Jane Hu surveyed Sigrid Nunez’s body of work in the Fall 2023 issue of Bookforum: “Like a lot of my favorite writers, Nunez tops from the bottom.”
“So, it was handbags that produced the conditions for human intelligence. You don’t have to tell me twice—I’ve literally never believed anything faster.” In the latest issue of the Yale Review, Audrey Wollen writes about the feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution,” how it inspired Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” and how humans create our selves and sentences.