After a brief hiatus, the weekly round-up returns! This is the twelfth in a series that brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: a literary and cultural history of worrying; writer reflections on the work of J. G. Ballard five years after his death; and the movie that inspired the creator of Mad Men to make an independent film. Take a look, and feel free to share!

Literature, Poetry, Theatre

• Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History
• David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
• Vera Graziadei on performing Dostoevsky’s Nameless Nobody
• Joseph Brodsky archive finds a home in America
• Robert Walser: Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories
• Gustave Flaubert‘s handwritten travel diary cross outs and comments reveal Madame Bovary author’s literary struggles
• ‘We are all Thomas More’s children’—China Miéville on 500 yrs of Utopia
• Nelson Algren was once a literary superstar; now he’s best known for his most famous girlfriend, Simone de Beauvoir
• Dystopia dominates Amazon classics list
• Sci-fi and literature: how well have writers predicted the future?
• J.G. Ballard – 5 Years On. Seven writers, including philosopher John Gray, explore what makes his books so memorable and so strange
• Michel Butor: The Writer’s Writer?
• Hear 75 Free, Classic Audio Books on Spotify: Austen, Joyce, Bukowski, Kafka, Vonnegut, Poe, Kerouac & More
• Hear Albert Camus read the famous opening passage of The Stranger (1947)
• CFP: Ted Hughes & Place, University of Huddersfield, June 2017. Deadline 31st Dec 2016
• ‘Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out. I … am likely to become a mere accessory.’ – Sylvia Plath, 7 November 1959
• W.H. Auden’s 1941 literature syllabus asks students to read 32 great works, covering 6000 pages
• The real-life doctor who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Remembering D. H. Lawrence in the season of banned books
• “It’s all the art of impersonation, isn’t it? That’s the fundamental novelistic gift.” — Philip Roth
• Kim Gordan’s Top 10 Books
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s permanence
• Jane Eyre facsimile manuscript to be published for ‘Brontë bibliophiles’
• Samuel Beckett‘s dual life as an operative for the French resistance
• “Through lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.” —Paul Auster
• How experts are digitizing ancient manuscripts
• R.S. Thomas poems discovered in art books are published
• The continuing relevance of James Baldwin
• Adaptation and the loss of innocence
• Vladimir Nabokov saw himself as an American writer. He was also a critic of American culture, especially its racism
• On a park bench with Thomas Bernhard
• Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and the crucial role of the small press
• On reading and writing and slowly going nowhere — A brief reflection
• Roger Luckhurst on the life and works of H. G. Wells

• Does America deserve to survive? William Faulkner’s provocative question from 1955 echoes loudly in 2016

Art, Design, Photography

• Paul Klee’s ‘Twittering Machine’
• Meet the artist who makes brutalist sandcastles on Coney Island
• Happy 100th Birthday to Dada, the art movement that responded to political unrest with absurdity
• Many of the works in “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” are ravishingly beautiful
• Abstract Expressionism: The View from the Top
• Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art. Narrated by Gene Hackman
• Rumours of more arts cuts at the New York Times
• John Berger at 90: The Verso podcast in collaboration with London Review Bookshop
• Gerhard Richter took photographs of the thick layers of paint that came from tempering different colours
• How technology is inviting a deep dive into art, as in virtual reality experience Dreams of Dalí
• 11 Female Minimalists You Should Know
• A collection of striking 20th century travel posters will have you dreaming of a fall getaway
• New York Central Railroad Mercury locomotive in Chicago, 7 July 1936. Photograph: Henry Dreyfuss
• The Barbican asked artists to submit a wordless comic around the theme of Jazz -here’s their top 5 chosen by Art Spiegelman
• LGBT prisoners’ art exhibit offers voice to the incarcerated – and ‘call to action’
• Miniature scenes of apocalyptic architecture by Nix + Gerber
• Hear about Figure with Meat & other Francis Bacon works on show at Getty Museum’s Getty Center, via their mobile audio tour
• Bruno Munari’s chair spread from “Design as Art” (1966)
• Frida Kahlo writes a personal letter to Georgia O’Keeffe after O’Keeffe’s nervous breakdown (1933)

Philosophy & Theory

• Michael Wood reviews the English translation of Samoyault’s Roland Barthes biography
• ‘Literature is the question minus the answer.’ — Roland Barthes, born 12 Nov. 1915
• Attempting to examine and articulate the values of close reading
• In Antiquarian and Revolutionary Walter Benjamin, Berger presents his engagement with one of his greatest influences
• Underlining Primo Levi‘s status as one of the most important writers of our time
• 1989 recording of Edward Said defending and supporting Salman Rushdie after the fatwa
• Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks
• Hear Albert Camus read the famous opening passage of The Stranger (1947)
• On the failure of poststructuralist parenting

Music

• A tribute to the late Leonard Cohen
• John Coltrane‘s Philadelphia home “is vacant, in disrepair and largely ignored.”
• The piano tuner for Duke Ellington’s last performance gives an interview
• The story of ‘Ella and Louis‘ 60 years later
• See Bill Evans play Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on Swedish TV in 1970
• Jazz pianist Randy Weston‘s visit to Harvard
• Watch Four Iconic Live Performances by Billie Holiday
• New Mural at the American Jazz Museum embodies a message of peace
• The Barbican asked artists to submit a wordless comic around the theme of Jazz -here’s their top 5 chosen by Art Spiegelman
• Kim Gordan’s Top 10 Books
• NYC Winter JazzFest to Honor Thelonious Monk
• Composers whose handwriting most matches their music
• Bob Dylan: Oracle and Iconoclast
• How Max Richter creates the soundtrack to TV’s most distinctive dystopian universes

Film & TV

• American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11
• Watching Great Movies with Roger Ebert
• What was it like to work for Stanley Kubrick?
• Did a silent film about a train really inspire audiences to stampede?
• Aliens is the last sci-fi or action film that actually pushed those genres forward. It can’t now be topped
• You’ll never guess what movie inspired the writer of Mad Men to make an independent film
• How film noir continues to speak to us 75 years after The Maltese Falcon first set it soaring
• Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch “Lessons from the Screenplay”
• Adaptation and the loss of innocence

News & Politics

• Donald Trump as US president: what it means for higher education
• Lauren Elkin on anti-flaneur, Trump, & how his candidacy is like “constantly being harassed on [her] way to work.”
• Sotheby’s reports a loss of $54.5 million in the third quarter
• Underlining Primo Levi‘s status as one of the most important writers of our time

Miscellaneous

• CFP: Freedom After Neoliberalism, University of York, 9-10 June 2017
• CFP: New Feminist Studies Journal. Deadline: 20 Nov.