Curating some of the best recent links across literature, philosophy, and the arts
Happy Halloween! This is the tenth in a weekly series that brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: Zadie Smith on Beyoncé; Wittgenstein’s love of detective fiction; and a selection of ghoulish links to things that go bump in the night. Take a look, and feel free to share!
Literature, Poetry, Theatre
- Toni Morrison wins PEN/Saul Bellow award for lifetime contribution to American fiction
- Michiko Kakutani’s review of Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- The London Beckett Seminar 2016-2017
- Samuel Beckett Week at Reading
- Bob Dylan finally speaks about his Nobel Prize: “Amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?”
- The fate of girls in books
- Philip Roth is donating his books to Newark Public Library
- Writing Back: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea 50 years later
- Listen to Maggie Gyllenhaal reading from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The real-life places that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
- 11 Novels with Emotional Ghosts
- Listen to Shirley Jackson’s classic horror short story, “The Lottery.”
- 5 hours of Vincent Price reading Edgar Allan Poe
- When Charles Dickens Met Edgar Allan Poe, and Dickens’ Pet Raven Inspired Poe’s Poem “The Raven”
- A new biography uncovers the “quiet tragedy” of Ernest Hemingway
- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Vladimir Nabokov (she was his student at Cornell University in the 1950s
- Tragic, fascinating, brilliant – life of ‘wild child’ Zelda Fitzgerald revisited
- Christopher Marlowe Officially Credited As Co-Author Of 3 Shakespeare Plays
- Zadie Smith: What Beyoncé taught me
- Race, Gender, and Celebrity Meet on a Global Stage in Zadie Smith’s Bold New Novel
- Archival pleasures: Ads in The New York Times Book Review this week in 1924
- Anne Carson’s new collection waves off conventional book packaging
- Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel comes to life on the internet
- “I wanted to grow up and just be a reader, just be someone who read.” —Lydia Davis
- Read Marjorie Perloff’s tribute to the poet and critic David Antin on the CI blog
- In this season’s true-crime books: Sex, betrayal, murder, forgery and more
- Hear J.G. Ballard Stories Adapted as Surreal Soundscapes
Art, Design, Photography
- In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: Richard Chopping & Denis Wirth-Miller
- Contemporary Artists discuss the Art on a Postcard Project
- The brilliant Art of the Title takes a look at David Fincher’s Se7en
- Van Gogh ‘cut off his ear after learning brother was to marry’
- See New York City’s busy streets, Photoshopped into desolation
- An often-overlooked side of Pablo Picasso‘s art is back in focus
- Rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower
- Complementary Perspectives on Agnes Martin
- “I’m trying to say it’s time to look at who we really are.” –Marilyn Minter, painter
- Art Spiegelman’s early, wordless graphic novel about mankind’s appetite for war
Philosophy & Theory
- Günther Anders: A Philosopher for the Modern Age
- Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971
- Ludwig Wittgenstein’s love of the hard-boiled crime writer Norbert Davis
- Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today
- Socrates’s purity of motivation is impossible for philosophers to sustain in modern capitalist society
Music
- Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon
- The 20 CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and Placed on Prototype iPods (2001)
- Yoko Ono’s Vintage Sonic Blasts Still Sound Like the Future
- A typewriter for writing music
- Andrew Norman, one of contemporary classical music’s fastest-rising stars
Film & TV
- The brilliant Art of the Title takes a look at David Fincher’s Se7en
- Psycho and the anxiety of the Interstate Highway System
- Xan Brooks talks to filmmaker Werner Herzog about, well, being Werner Herzog
- Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Kids (1962)
- Stacey Abbott picks her top 6 first person zombie narratives
- Terence Nance’s Top 10 Movies from the Criterion Collection
News & Politics
- Doris Kearns Goodwin and Rachel Maddow talk about the 2016 presidential campaign
- Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: the racially charged rise of a demagogue
Miscellaneous
- PhD Studentships available! University of Brighton, deadline 16 January 2017
- Call for papers: Special issue of Somatechnics on Cinematic Bodies