Thursday, February 6

Tag: authors

Maggie Nelson on the Conversations She Wants to Be Having
7Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Maggie Nelson on the Conversations She Wants to Be Having

We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so—which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think. For this, her books are beloved by audiences with varying attachments to the categories that are often, imperfectly, applied to what they are reading: “memoir,” “art criticism,” “poetry,” “queer theory,” “feminism.” This is one way of saying that describing Nelson’s writing can be harder than consuming it, as one of its defining features involves unfurling the shorthand that governs—literally and figuratively—so much of our lives, including the terms we use to identify ourselves.Nelson was raised in Northern California and moved to N...
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Greg Jackson Reads “Wagner in the Desert”
1Jan By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Greg Jackson Reads “Wagner in the Desert”

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter.On a special, archival New Year’s episode, Greg Jackson reads his story “Wagner in the Desert,” from the July 21, 2014, issue of the magazine, in which a group of old friends convene in Palm Springs, California, for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Jackson, a winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, is the author of the story collection “Prodigals” and the novel “The Dimensions of a Cave,” which was published in October, 2023.
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Justin Torres’s Art of Exposure and Concealment
1Jan By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Justin Torres’s Art of Exposure and Concealment

According to the author Justin Torres, “Backstory and exposition are tricks of the adult mind.” That explains why his first novel, “We the Animals,” which is told from the shared perspective of three young brothers in upstate New York, unfolds not as a narrative but as a string of vignettes. The semi-autobiographical novel describes a family with not enough money or status to satisfy its hungers for food, dignity, safety, or belonging. The boys, born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father, are halfway feral: their father, who has an explosive temper, disappears for days at a time; their mother works the overnight shift at a brewery. Parental love is abundant but expressed complexly, through touch, hard and soft, through delirious predawn meat loaves.“We the Animals” came out in 2011,...
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Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named
6Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named

In Oslo, in September, I attended the preview of Jon Fosse’s play, “I Svarte Skogen Inne” (“Inside the Black Forest”). The theatre was small and dark, without a stage, and the scenery was minimal: a large illuminated rock in the middle, some scattered trees, and the audience members, many of whom were seated in folding chairs ringed around the rock. A trumpeter entered first, blowing long, melancholy notes, followed by a young man. The man explained that he had gone for a drive and, when his car had stalled, he had wandered into the woods. It grew darker and colder, and the audience heard the voices of an older man and an older woman speak about the young man, expressing their distress at the direction his life had taken. Then, without warning, a young woman appeared.She was called a youn...
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