June 7, 2017
On Denis Johnson, 1949–2017
For all of its glorious derangement—hallucinatory tales of druggies and low-lives and murderers and fuck-ups, including a guy so far gone his friends all call him “Fuckhead”—Denis Johnson’s writing is always rooted in the conviction that life is sacred, that evil is a symptom of suffering, which is to say of estrangement from the sacred.
March 23, 2017
1929–2017
February 24, 2017
And reading Doris Lessing.
Of course I’ve owned feminine clothing all my life. But I wore it in public only as a gesture of deference toward my hosts or my audience—never as a way of being myself. For reasons I struggle to comprehend, The Golden Notebook made me feel that a woman can be as valuable as a man, as limitless in her potential, with the same right to drape her body in a lot of extra fabric. (Maybe you know Umberto Eco’s 1976 essay on the emasculating effect of putting on jeans when you’re used to a suit. He should see the jeans they have now.)
January 19, 2017
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, an interview with n+1 cofounder Mark Greif about his book Against Everything.
December 15, 2016
From headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post opinion pages since November 8, 2016.
Want to visit the Jazz Age?
Can you live on the minimum wage?
October 2, 2016
By protecting her privacy, Elena Ferrante protected ours.
“Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” reads the headline of the latest attempt to reveal her identity. To which one might ask: an answer to what?
August 30, 2016
Does your brother entertain you with witty anecdotes? Does he tell you stories about his day? Does he ask you questions about your own life? Is he contributing anything to this ride situation at all? Or is he sort of sitting there, like some kind of prince who expects to be driven around?
August 19, 2016
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, we feature Jonathan Griffin, author of the book On Fire, in conversation with Paper Monument editor Dushko Petrovich. On Fire explores the phenomenon of studio fires and how artists recover in the aftermath.
July 14, 2016
Whatever early progress the Library of Congress made on the internet has been squandered.
The job Carla Hayden has before her is to prepare the Library of Congress to serve another century of US citizens where we’ve become most accustomed to consuming information: the internet.
April 29, 2016
1947–2016
Jenny Diski was my friend. We exchanged a flood of ideas during her preparations for her 2013 book, What I Don’t Know About Animals. I am re-reading parts of our exchange now—the writing, by some sort of magic I’ll never really understand, continues to live. The preoccupations we shared, at least at the time, were: animals; humans; the vague boundaries of what constituted cannibalism (she brought up the rumor that Keith Richards had snorted the ashes of his own father, which plainly trumped my example of tuberculosis patients getting prescriptions, well into the 19th century, to drink the blood of executed prisoners); our reclusiveness; and, occasionally, our day-to-day accomplishments, travails, and happinesses.
P.S. I just bought my girlfriend a full set of Reiki-infused chakra crystals for Christmas.
March 23, 2016
“It started as a normal novel about fathers and sons, one of those, so I always knew I wanted to write about fathers and sons. And I thought I could do it in a realist way, tracking a father and a son through a relationship or whatever, and I was completely unable to do that. There were two or three years where essentially, everyday, I would start from scratch. I liked the starting out, I liked having a father and a son in some weird situation, and then I would sort of try to maneuver them in a realist way, and it would fall apart and collapse. After a couple of years of this and feeling crazy, probably under the influence of some other books that had somewhat similar forms, I realized I could just sort of take each of the beginnings and turn them into their own mini story and have the relationship kind of come out of the way the stories interacted with each other.”
December 11, 2015
James Dickey is interested in visiting the USSR but as of yet has not been able to find the time.
“Really? It seems glib, that’s all.” —Eileen Myles
Who will tell you stories then?
A friend of mine in Hollywood once built a twenty-foot waterfall in his backyard to ward off his dire premonitions, which were bound up with his bad marriage and a terrible case of the shakes. He became convinced that something awful would happen.
The question needs to become, which truth are they telling, and for whom?
November 30, 2015
A sonic youth grows old
Born in 1972 (or, as the back cover of his new book of poems puts it, “during the Nixon administration”), Michael Robbins experienced, growing up, a tremendous run of good luck. It didn’t have much to do with his immediate environment.
November 4, 2015
On Grantland
In 2011, Bill Simmons founded Grantland, a niche sports blog that operated out of ESPN’s website. For around a decade Simmons had enjoyed his own “Sports Guy” column on ESPN, where he opined about all things sports- and culture-related, reading sports through culture and culture through sports. Part of Simmons’s The Book of Basketball contains an extended comparison of Kobe Bryant with Michael J. Fox’s character in Teen Wolf, for instance.
October 23, 2015
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and literary activism
In this business of recollecting the world before the free market, before globalization, voluntary memory misleads, and the flicker of involuntary memory throws up, as ever, an array of fragments and sensations, but doesn’t, in itself, instruct us in the ethics of the vanished order, an ethics we have critiqued but whose proximity we no longer sense. So it is almost impossible now to remember—as it was impossible then to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of President Obama—that poetry was the literary genre to which the greatest prestige accrued until the mid-’80s.
October 5, 2015
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which talk about African writing centers on how to talk about African writing. The most common topic of debate is the Caine Prize, a high-profile short-story competition based in London and open only to authors of African descent (earning it the derivative and slightly patronizing epithet “the African Booker”). Each summer when the shortlist is announced, there is a flurry of op-eds and interviews with African writers who decry the neocolonial hold of British institutions on their careers. Many writers go on to question the very idea of a prize designated for “Africans,” arguing that it threatens to impose false geographical and thematic restrictions on a vast range of writers.
September 10, 2015
Joining us on this episode of the n+1 podcast is Christine Smallwood, who reads from her short story “Hand Jobs” originally published in issue 22 of n+1, then she stays for a short conversation on writing the story.
On Maggie Nelson
To use Myles’s metaphor: Nelson is half a scholar with a downturned cup, attempting to trap something scuttling uncooperatively around, and half a writer-bug, trying to dodge the cup.
There is always nothing you can say that is absolutely right, but you must speak anyway.
“Let’s face it,” the retired intelligence officer told Hersh. “We’re going to commit a murder.”
July 27, 2015
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Jo Livingstone about intern labor in publishing. Mixed in with their conversation are excerpts from n+1’s Labor and Letters Symposium in April discussing the state of labor in publishing today. Nikil Saval moderates the Symposium panel, featuring guests Aaron Braun, Sarah Jaffe, Maxine Phillips, and Maida Rosenstein.
June 7, 2017
On Denis Johnson, 1949–2017
For all of its glorious derangement—hallucinatory tales of druggies and low-lives and murderers and fuck-ups, including a guy so far gone his friends all call him “Fuckhead”—Denis Johnson’s writing is always rooted in the conviction that life is sacred, that evil is a symptom of suffering, which is to say of estrangement from the sacred.
March 23, 2017
1929–2017
February 24, 2017
And reading Doris Lessing.
Of course I’ve owned feminine clothing all my life. But I wore it in public only as a gesture of deference toward my hosts or my audience—never as a way of being myself. For reasons I struggle to comprehend, The Golden Notebook made me feel that a woman can be as valuable as a man, as limitless in her potential, with the same right to drape her body in a lot of extra fabric. (Maybe you know Umberto Eco’s 1976 essay on the emasculating effect of putting on jeans when you’re used to a suit. He should see the jeans they have now.)
January 19, 2017
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, an interview with n+1 cofounder Mark Greif about his book Against Everything.
December 15, 2016
From headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post opinion pages since November 8, 2016.
Want to visit the Jazz Age?
Can you live on the minimum wage?
October 2, 2016
By protecting her privacy, Elena Ferrante protected ours.
“Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” reads the headline of the latest attempt to reveal her identity. To which one might ask: an answer to what?
August 30, 2016
Does your brother entertain you with witty anecdotes? Does he tell you stories about his day? Does he ask you questions about your own life? Is he contributing anything to this ride situation at all? Or is he sort of sitting there, like some kind of prince who expects to be driven around?
August 19, 2016
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, we feature Jonathan Griffin, author of the book On Fire, in conversation with Paper Monument editor Dushko Petrovich. On Fire explores the phenomenon of studio fires and how artists recover in the aftermath.
July 14, 2016
Whatever early progress the Library of Congress made on the internet has been squandered.
The job Carla Hayden has before her is to prepare the Library of Congress to serve another century of US citizens where we’ve become most accustomed to consuming information: the internet.
April 29, 2016
1947–2016
Jenny Diski was my friend. We exchanged a flood of ideas during her preparations for her 2013 book, What I Don’t Know About Animals. I am re-reading parts of our exchange now—the writing, by some sort of magic I’ll never really understand, continues to live. The preoccupations we shared, at least at the time, were: animals; humans; the vague boundaries of what constituted cannibalism (she brought up the rumor that Keith Richards had snorted the ashes of his own father, which plainly trumped my example of tuberculosis patients getting prescriptions, well into the 19th century, to drink the blood of executed prisoners); our reclusiveness; and, occasionally, our day-to-day accomplishments, travails, and happinesses.
P.S. I just bought my girlfriend a full set of Reiki-infused chakra crystals for Christmas.
March 23, 2016
“It started as a normal novel about fathers and sons, one of those, so I always knew I wanted to write about fathers and sons. And I thought I could do it in a realist way, tracking a father and a son through a relationship or whatever, and I was completely unable to do that. There were two or three years where essentially, everyday, I would start from scratch. I liked the starting out, I liked having a father and a son in some weird situation, and then I would sort of try to maneuver them in a realist way, and it would fall apart and collapse. After a couple of years of this and feeling crazy, probably under the influence of some other books that had somewhat similar forms, I realized I could just sort of take each of the beginnings and turn them into their own mini story and have the relationship kind of come out of the way the stories interacted with each other.”
