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

A selection of the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that have caught my eye this week. Highlights include: an interview with President Barack Obama on his life as a reader and writer; the late Mark Fisher’s discussion of post-punk group Joy Division; a free Yale course on the American Novel since 1945; and much more.
Literature, Poetry, Theatre
- Looking for Albert Camus’ The Stranger
- President Barack Obama discussing his love of books, and his life as a reader and a writer
- The American Novel Since 1945: Free Yale Course on Nabokov, Kerouac, Morrison, Pynchon and more
- Don DeLillo on his daily writing routine. “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
- William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, a milestone in horror fiction, dies at 89
- Top 10 books about wild women
- DeLillo, Wallace, Bolaño, Eliot, Donna Tartt: Big books that are worth your time
- 12 contemporary writers on how they revise their work
- Writing is not in the least an easy art.—Virginia Woolf, diary
- 30 essential crime reads by women
- Svetlana Alexievich has joined the flow of prominent writers to quit the Russian PEN Centre
- 11 Classics of the New Gothic Canon
- Herman Melville’s Bartleby and the steely strength of mild rebellion
- Philip Roth‘s novels have received a bold design makeover from Vintage
Art, Design, Photography
- Los Angeles, lovers and light: David Hockney at 80
- Three Essential Dadaist Films: Groundbreaking Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp
- How Georgia O’Keeffe left her cheating husband for a mountain
Philosophy and Theory
- Mark Fisher (aka. k-punk), influential music writer and theorist, has died
- Historicizing the Ageing Self
- Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard
Music
- John Coltrane, Alabama and Martin Luther King
- Alice Coltrane on Piano Jazz
- Arvo Pärt is the world’s most performed living composer sixth year running
- The late Mark Fisher on Joy Division
- The Story of Sonny Stitt
- Hear Bob Dylan’s 1965 interview with Nat Hentoff
- Six Decades of Jazz with Nat Hentoff
- Clinical psychologist reports that David Bowie frequently appears in people’s hallucinations
- David Bowie‘s final songs released to mark 70th birthday
Film & TV
- Coen Brothers Planning First TV Series
- Lost Highway 20th anniversary: 5 films that influenced David Lynch’s nightmarish neo-noir
- How Britain has changed since post-punk classic Radio On
News, History, Politics
- Mrs. King and Coretta: A Posthumous Memoir Explores Public and Private Selves
- The late Zygmunt Bauman on how Neoliberalism paved the way for Donald Trump
- ‘Female’ is an adjective, not a noun
Call for Papers
- Queer Modernism(s), April 2017
- The City as Modernist Ephemera, June 2017
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: Certainty, Limits and Animality, June 2017
- Utopia After the Human, April 2017
- Wyndham Lewis’ Texts, Contexts, and Aesthetics, September 2017