Curating some of the best recent links across literature, philosophy, and the arts
The weekly round-up brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: 10 things you didn’t know about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Laurence Jackson Hyman on his mother, Shirley Jackson; and Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Literature, Poetry, Theatre
- Read Bob Dylan’s Entire Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
- Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist imagines WWII through the eyes of Freud and a boy from the country
- Roland Barthes and Poetry: Calum Gardner talks to RhysTranter.com
- 8 things you didn’t know about Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment on the 150th anniversary of its publication
- Profile of South African feminist writer Olive Schreiner
- “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with.” — Gordon Lish
- Laurence Jackson Hyman on his mother Shirley Jackson: ‘Her work is so relevant now…’
- The 100 best nonfiction books: No 46 – The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)
- “What a bitch of a thing prose is!”—Gustave Flaubert
- Tim Parks reviews a biography of Gustave Flaubert
- Emily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap Poetry
- Yu Pao Scott Chin’s eerie reimagining of Lord of the Flies
- ‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’ Start reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
- “Proust has been an influence on me, all my life—an influence so deep it frightens me.” —Nadine Gordimer
- 1st ed. of James Joyce’s Collected Poems, 1936
- James Joyce’s sincerity and honest effort: from Judge John M. Woolsey’s ruling rejecting the charge of obscenity against Ulysses, December 1933
- Voices, knowledge and ignorance: Reflections on experiences of Samuel Beckett‘s late prose text Company
- Irish poet John Montague dies in France aged 87
- Irish poets react to the death of John Montague
- Was Oscar Wilde rebelling against the mother he wished to resemble?
- Finding wisdom in the letters of aging writers
- Franz Kafka‘s biographer says the author’s “anti-sensual” fears were shared by millions of his middle-class peers
- Personal archive of P. G. Wodehouse made available for public viewing at the British Library
- For that special modernist in your life (from the FT’s Christmas gift guide)
- Jenny Diski remembered by Ian Patterson
- 1959 first edition of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Jacket artwork by Milton Glaser
- Gabriel García Márquez used to send his books to Fidel Castro for his opinion and notes before submitting to his publisher
- “I am an obscure, doubly obscure, writer with an unpronounceable name.” — Vladimir Nabokov
- How reading W.B. Yeats has changed for one Boston Review writer after Trump’s victory
- Donald Barthelme‘s syllabus of 81 books, given each year to his University of Houston students
- 1953 US paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, with a cover design by Edward Gorey
Art, Design, Photography
- A Fresh Look at Willem de Kooning
- Yu Pao Scott Chin’s eerie reimagining of Lord of the Flies
- The interior of the Hindenburg in 1930s colour photos
- How MoMA’s exploration of modern interiors spotlights women’s contributions to architecture & design
- Man Ray‘s Chess Set of 1920 has been reissued
- Tim Burton’s Gothic Dolls
- Rooftops and streets by Charles Ginner (1878–1952) of the Camden Town Group
- 1959 first edition of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Jacket artwork by Milton Glaser
- Let the brilliantly photographed titles to Icelandic series Trapped pull you under
Philosophy & Theory
- Roland Barthes and Poetry
- Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard
- Moral character and the self
Music
- Read Bob Dylan’s Entire Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
- “This was a good year for weird jazz.”
- Geoffrey Smith surveys how Louis Armstrong transformed jazz in the 1920s
- The importance of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra today and its significance in music history
- Sun Ra plays a music therapy gig at a mental hospital
- Music is the only industry where buyers prefer ancient technology from 50 years ago
- Richard Brody on discovering jazz thanks to Dave Brubeck—and to the radio
Film & TV
- Larry David talks Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Tim Burton’s Gothic Dolls
- Francis Ford Coppola’s handwritten casting notes for The Godfather
- Four neo-noir movies set in old Los Angeles
- Adventures in Moviegoing: SNL’s Bill Hader shares his formative experiences with his favorite films
- Let the brilliantly photographed titles to Icelandic series Trapped pull you under
News, History, Politics
- Gloria Steinem: ‘Fewer people will say we live in a post-racist, post-feminist world’
- Elie Wiesel remembered by Menachem Rosensaft
- The uneven assimilation of Jews into Germany
- Collecting experiences of lived Black History
- What history’s love letters reveal about Britain’s past