10 is a great number.
A new issue of The Drift is on its way.
The Drift has sent its 10th issue to printers. I’ll have a story in it. (“Print, thy name is Angelo,” a friend texts.) See the lineup here. If you’d like a copy in the mail, subscribe by today. Otherwise you can find the magazine in bookstores, or ask your library to stock it. Or: The Perfect Gift for Dad.
It has been a while. I have been reading lots of stories. Some recent favorites include “Anne Moore’s Life” by Roberto Bolaño, “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol (spurred by , who has a new story, “Thursday,” out in the New Yorker), and (in anticipation of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home) much Lorrie Moore.
Z brought me to Puerto Rico, where she was presenting. While she attended panels, I roamed bookshops — Casa Norberto, The Bookmark, Libreria Norberto González, Libreria Mágica — and came away with Cortázar, di Benedetto, and Spanish translations of Camus, Kafka, and Piri Thomas. I wasn’t able to find Coetzee’s El Polaco, though I stumbled across a translation (by Miguel Martínez- Lange) of Disgrace and am rereading. I almost used the word “enjoy” here but then remembered this bit from Lorrie Moore’s introduction to See What Can Be Done:
I have tried to avoid petulance, Internet-ese, literary theory, the diction and dialect of the professionally educated critic, and never to use the word “relatable” instead of “sympathetic,” or “impact” as a verb, or any form of the word “enjoy,” which should be reserved for one’s grandparents or other relatives.
I open each NYRB hoping for Zadie Smith, each New Yorker hoping for James Wood, and each LIBER for my friend S. C. Cornell, who has a piece on Sontag’s On Women in the new issue:
The sparseness of the collection is not really the fault of its editor, her son David Rieff, who is also Sontag’s literary executor. Having decided to rescue Sontag’s reputation as a feminist thinker, he had few essays from which to choose. Compared to her output on, say, Antonin Artaud, Sontag wrote little about women, and many of her best-known essays on would-be feminist themes, like camp and pornography, are really essays on aesthetic theory.
I am excited for the new Brandon Taylor novel, The Late Americans, especially for its story-cycle structure. Garth Greenwell (whose recent essay on Philip Roth I loved) aptly described the debate in :
There’s been some discussion about whether it’s more properly a novel—as it’s labeled—or a book of interlinked short stories. (This was also a question about Cleanness, which I tried to sidestep by refusing to label it as one thing or the other. It didn’t matter; people who felt strongly that it was a story collection still got mad that it had been packaged, though it hadn’t, as a novel. Oh well.) It’s such a dumb question; who cares?
The stills and posters in this entry are from recent favorite movies. Last month I saw two Yale Film Archive screenings in one week: Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (the picture of ennui) and Spielberg/Kubrick’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (whose dystopian “Man-hattan” is prescient), films selected by Carlos Valladares, who warned, in his excellent introduction to AI: Artificial Intelligence, that we’d need kleenex, which, in the end, we did.