A fine essay in Granta by Amitava Kumar that weaves together the political hatred inherent in Hindu nationalism and the heat crisis accompanying climate change to render a troubling picture of India today.
Art Winslow
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An engaging revisitation of Gravity's Rainbow as it turns 50.
Excellent extended interview with Gordon Lish, whose views on writing, editing and life itself -- access to the sublime -- are insightful.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6423/the-art-of-editing-no-2-gordon-lish?fbclid=IwAR3fpEfZvVEtp8U0kNWFMhAlCSjHdXHTfHravqTxgGBLxYIl-xcumMm9IY0&mibextid=Zxz2cZ
The Art of Editing No. 2
It’s the custom for editors to keep a low profile and to underplay any changes they may make to an author’s manuscript. Gordon Lish is a different animal. Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous—or notorious—as a sculptor of other people’s prose. As ficti...
Victor was a mensch as much as a great journalistic force, he put a lot of heart into everything he did.
U5
NYTimes: Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90
Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90 https://nyti.ms/3JcOw9K
I don't read Sanskrit and most likely you don't either. However, you use recombinant words all the time, and may find this article about word-building as fascinating as I did.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-ancient-grammatical-puzzle-years.html
Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
A grammatical problem that has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by "the father of linguistics," Pāṇini.
This Paris Review interview with Charles Simic is an education in itself, his wide-ranging knowledge, his down-to-earth yet learned perspectives on poetry and other poets will leave you the richer for having read it. RIP
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5507/the-art-of-poetry-no-90-charles-simic
The Art of Poetry No. 90
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. His early childhood was, inevitably, dominated by the Nazi invasion, and some of his most powerful poems derive from memories of this period. In “Two Dogs,” for instance, he recalls watching the Germans march past hi...
Jay RosenWhat the so-called “Twitter Files” actually reveal.
“It isn’t Twitter’s fault that so much conservative discourse in the Trump era is so deeply, fundamentally dishonest.”
This is one of the best cut-through-the-noise pieces I have read in months. Seriously. It's that good.
This review by Joy Williams of Jim Gauer's novel Novel Explosives is spot-on: it's an astoundingly good book that should be on your radar but almost certainly is not. It's extremely playful and dead serious at the same time. The amnesiac narrator thinks he's a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa's, since that's what his ID tells him. Let Williams explain it better than I have the space to here.
https://books.substack.com/p/review-joy-williams-on-jim-gauer
Review: Joy Williams on Jim Gauer
"Novel Explosives" is a big burning turning ferris wheel of a book with many colorful capsules of expertise and pods of excess. It is violent and profound, taunting, outraged. It is arrogantly discursive yet can possess the focused intensity of a knife’s tip.
A fascinating interview with Olga Tokarczuk, touching on central European history, the female character in literature, the nature of fiction, and more.
A piece by David Ulin in the LA Times, which accurately captures what Bookforum (a newly announced extinct species) has meant to writers and readers. It's a death in the family.
