Robert Seethaler, The Tobacconist

Willem de Kooning

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