February 6, 2024
I knew I was running away from everything, but I did not want to plunge a fork into my life and look at it too closely.
— Deborah Levy, August Blue
Some books out today: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (FSG), Inland by Gerald Murnane (reissue from And Other Stories), and lots from New Directions, including Praiseworthy and Carpentaria by Alexis Wright and Wrong Norma by Anne Carson. Later this month, look forward to Red Pyramids and Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin (NYRB) and Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Knopf). Also out today: the new issue of Bookforum. (But first: did you read Leo Robson on Coetzee in the last? If not, do!)
Last week, Alexander Sammartino and Dana Spiotta packed the house. They spoke about his new novel, Last Acts, a tragicomedy in which a father and son attempt to resuscitate a dying gun shop. Dana, noting that virtually every character in the book is a salesman, asked what interests Alex in sales. Alex spoke about the artist-as-salesman: “You’re constantly trying to get someone to listen to you and constantly being told to fuck off.” Alex and I will be in conversation at Grey Matter Books in New Haven on March 20, 6:30pm. If you’re interested in attending, let me know.
In Joy Williams’s latest story for The New Yorker, a woman tries to convince her dying father to leave her his beach house instead of donating it to an organization for abandoned German Shepherds. “We’ve never even known a German shepherd,” the daughter says. But the father can’t forgive her for killing and collecting conches at the beach house as a child. Naturally, his ‘92 Bronco will be bequeathed to their ten-year old neighbor, Walter, who, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, says, “I want to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silence.”
I am new to Liberties magazine but couldn't have asked for a better introduction than Ryan Ruby’s essay on Proust: “the major difficulty of reading In Search of Lost Time today is not placed there by Proust; it is placed there by the economy. If, for the novel’s narrator, ‘lost time’ refers to the past, for its reader, one hundred years after Proust’s death, it refers to the present. Proust’s narrator searches for time lost to the past and finds it in memory and in the creation of a literary work of art; Proust’s twenty-first century reader searches for the time to read this literary work of art which is lost to a culture that is consecrated to speed and an economy at war with human-scale temporality and, more often than not, fails to find it.” Also worthwhile is Christian Lorentzen’s essay in the first-person-plural on coming up as a writer in New York: “These were writers, and, as we would learn from Trashy Weekly, where we would have to fix commas in order to pay rent, they were just like us. The point is we may have shown up too late to be Modernists or Postmodernists or Dirty Realists or members of the New York School or writers of New Narrative, but we weren’t too late for Publicity. We weren’t too late to be Famous.”
Rejoice: Sunday Lunch is back. In the first episode of their seventh season, Murray and Zahra talk “hairism,” Tom Cruise, and an auto-theory of masculinity. Having been part of the friend group that relentlessly pressured them to reboot over dinner last month—they thought it was dinner; we knew it was an intervention—I’m very excited about this. Expect new episodes every third Sunday. (My sources suggest the upcoming episode may contain talk of Spielberg.)
Yes we know we don’t believe in anything anymore. We write poems
And never open the curtains. Poems
They contain within themselves the secret workings of the sun
— Sean Bonney, Our Death