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