Letter to Denis Wirth-Miller from Francis Bacon. Image: Jon Lys Turner

Suited Man Walking Through Door, unstretched rolled canvas found in Wirth-Miller’s Storehouse studio. Unattributed. Image courtesy of Jon Lys Turner

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