On the Know Your Enemy podcast, Erik Baker talks about his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. Writing recently in the New Yorker, Anna Wiener notes that self-help-influenced ideas about work being a path to personal fulfillment may seem like a new phenomenon, but “Baker argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism.”
James Baldwin’s 1984 “Art of Fiction” interview is out from behind the paywall at the Paris Review. When asked about the distinction between art and protest, Baldwin says, “I thought of them both as literature and still do. . . . The only way I could play it, once indeed I found myself on that road, was to assume that if I had the talent, and my talent was important, it would simply have to survive whatever life brought. I couldn’t sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave.”
For Vulture, Matthew Schneier profiles New York City bookseller Sarah McNally. Schneier writes, “McNally’s is a thumb on the scale of cultural life in the city. She hosts several book groups at the stores and privately runs several more. Hang around literary circles long enough and word will reach you that she is reading Middlemarch with Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy and has read Clarice Lispector with David Byrne and Esther Perel.”
The Yale Review has announced the lineup for its Spring 2025 issue, which will feature Adrienne Kennedy, Jonathan Lethem, Isabella Hammad, Audrey Wollen, Sheila Heti, Abou Farman, Mona Oraby, and more.
Upcoming events: On Tuesday, February 4th, Vinson Cunningham will be celebrating the release of the paperback edition of his novel Great Expectations at an event at The Strand; on Thursday, February 6, National Book Critics Circle and the Freelance Solidarity Project are hosting the online panel, “How to Survive in the Book Criticism Landscape,” featuring panelists Tope Folarin, Zoe Hu, Hillary Kelly, Kevin Lozano, and Adam Dalva.