Curating some of the best recent links across literature, philosophy, and the arts

In the final weekly-round up of the year, a selection of the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that have caught my eye this holiday season. Including: reflections on the legacy of actress and screenwriter Carrie Fisher; an interview with Bethany Rose Lamont, whose print journal Doll Hospital uses art and literature to explore mental health issues; 2016’s most essential jazz reissue; and much more.
Literature, Poetry, Theatre
- Reading Biographical Fiction: An interview with Michael Lackey
- Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion: An interview with Sarah Hammerschlag
- A Visit to Doll Hospital: A new print journal that explores mental health issues through art and literature
- Alan Mandell will finish his career the way he started it: with a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
- From Octavia Butler‘s journals: her list of what is “sexy”
- ‘This isn’t a cyberpunk future. This is the Restoration Hardware version of a cyberpunk future’ — William Gibson
- The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin
- Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s Lolly Willowes is ‘a great shout of life’
- The Economist explains Stefan Zweig‘s revival
- UK Communities needing libraries as much as ever
- Reconsidering Virginia Woolf‘s Christmas diaries written between 1920-1940
- Alex Wells’ illustrated Isaac Asimov volumes
- A historical look at underground Black publishing in America, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Black Lives Matter
- The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk
- Writing advice from John Steinbeck, from a letter in 1962
- Review of Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography in Prospect Magazine
- “Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences.” —Saul Bellow
Art, Design, Photography
- How Edward Hopper “storyboarded” his iconic painting Nighthawks
- Teju Cole selects the best photo books of 2016
- Aleksi Pöyry on why Moominvalley in November is a Finnish classic and the best book of 1970
- Alex Wells’ illustrated Isaac Asimov volumes
- Virtual reconstructions of lost Frank Lloyd Wright buildings
- The entire Frieze archive, from the 1991 pilot issue to today, is freely available online
- Female Pioneers of the Bauhaus
- A Visit to Doll Hospital: A new print journal that explores mental health issues through art and literature
Philosophy & Theory
- Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion: An interview with Sarah Hammerschlag
- Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for writing with style (1882)
Music
- The Year’s Most Essential Jazz Reissue
- How Bach helped one Czech girl survive Auschwitz: ‘you always feel in his music that God is present somehow.’
- Joan Baez to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017
Film & TV
- On Carrie Fisher, Hollywood, and reclaiming women’s voices
- Carrie Fisher’s legacy may rest as much on her literary voice as on any character she played
- Martin Scorsese’s Silence has turned theology into art—which is a radical act
- Stanley Kubrick sitting in a chair playing with a cat on the set of A Clockwork Orange
- The morality of banking in It’s a Wonderful Life
News, History, Politics
- ‘We Have to Resist’: A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit
- Meet the amateur working at home who created a bigger archive of historical newspapers than the Library of Congress
Call for Papers
- The City as Modernist Ephemera, London, June 2017