The Uptown Local

One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.” Kristen Martin, The Washington Post

What Is Noise?

"Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.” Alex Ross, The New Yorker

What Is an Editor?

“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental.” Thus spake the venerable Joan Didion in a eulogistic essay about the late Henry Robbins, her editor first at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then at Simon & Schuster. Elroy Rosenberg, Tablet

Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn

Long Island returns Eilis, now in her 40s, to Ireland in the 1970s and the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago. While most of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the small town in County Wexford where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set, it opens in Long Island. It is here that Eilis has settled with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a knock at the door changes everything. [...] ‘Long Island is the first novel I’ve written in which no one dies’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Long Island is published by Picador.

Gaslighting

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.” (What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”) The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?” Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Diaries of Franz Kafka

This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries: an account of a trip to the theatre might be followed by a story draft, a gnomic half-sentence, the description of a prostitute, time spent watching a ski-jumping competition, relationship problems, dreams of a writing career in Berlin, a list of mistakes made by Napoleon in the Russian campaign, thoughts on the size of a fellow train traveller’s trouser bulge. The muddled presentation of all these elements, contextualised by thorough notes, gives the sense of Kafka not just as “the representative genius of the modern age”, as Benjamin describes him, but also a youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration, venting his frustrations and following his interests. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us. Chris Power, The Guardian

Diaries by Franz Kafka is published by Penguin Classics

Harlem on My Mind

In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition dedicated to the vibrant history of Harlem—the institution’s first attempt at displaying and interpreting African American culture. “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” came to life at the tail end of the civil rights movement and on the cusp of Black Power. [...]

Instead, “Harlem on My Mind” represented Harlem via floor-to-ceiling photomurals, archival ephemera, and street soundscapes alongside interpretive text. It was the cutting edge of immersive exhibition design; the Met had never put on an exhibition like it before (and hasn’t since). Yet from the perspective of many Black artists, critics, academics, and organizers, the show was woefully retrograde. Despite concerns raised by community representatives during the exhibition’s development, the Met had reduced the culture of Harlem to an object of sociological, or even ethnographic, inquiry. Black people were once again the subjects, rather than the authors of their representation. [...]

Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism.  Rachel Hunter Himes, The Nation

la mostra "The Harlem Renaissance" è al Met fino al 28 giugno

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

Crosswords

Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.

No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college.[...] 

Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?

These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

The Riddle of the Sphinx è pubblicato da HarperOne.