Reading the illegible. * Deconstruction — an American tale. * Adam Biles on ultimate questions. * Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company (podcast). * Shirley Jackson‘s disappearing act. * Ennio Morricone‘s Il Gruppo. * My erstwhile neighbour Marcello Mastroianni. * Former 3:AMer Jude Rogers reviews Simon Reynolds‘s Shock and Awe. * My review of Grand Hotel Abyss in the Irish Times. * Max Porter on grief and creativity. * Deborah Levy: “Yet, it’s when I detour from the map and get lost that the writing starts to open its eyes”. * Deborah Levy on mothers and daughters in literature: “In Things I Don’t Want to Know, I wrote that the modern mother is required to be ‘passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled’. This is the call made on strong, modern women. It is best not to take that call”. * Deborah Levy at Shakespeare and Company (podcast). * Walter Benjamin‘s short stories. * New fiction by Gary Lutz! * KJ Orr wins BBC national short story award. * An interview with KJ Orr: “And because short stories are so compressed, this wrangling can be powerful. So you have the possibility of things getting sorted right alongside all the uncertainties that are never soothed, the mysteries that are never solved, and the gaps in understanding”. * The magical Claire-Louise Bennett in Vogue: “‘That capacity to just be absolutely immersed in the world in the present moment is just, well, it’s just bliss, isn’t it?’ says Bennett. ‘It is bliss to just be able to feel that, and so much gets in the way of it.'” She’s also in the Paris Review and a new story of hers appears in Guernica. * Lauren Elkin talks to Brian Dillon at the London Review Bookshop. * Lauren Elkin on Flâneuse (podcast). * A young Patti Smith in a 1971 BBC documentary. * Lara Feigel on The Lesser Bohemians: “McBride manages to get across the essential strangeness of sex itself: the disjunction between the triviality and repetition of the physical acts and the intense, high emotion with which we can experience them; the way that within a single encounter we can go from being just bodies, doing odd things to each other, to minds, urgently expressing love, without it being easy to define what has shifted”. * Eimear McBride on how she wrote A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. * McBride interviewed: “Friday night, my husband and I put the baby to bed, put on the telly, eat Chinese takeaway and that is the best part of every week”. * Jonathan Meades on “yesterday’s cancelled tomorrows“. * Samuel Beckett, the maestro of failure: “What is life but preference for the ginger biscuit?” * Ben Lerner interviewed. * Brian Dillon on Against Everything: “The best essays Greif wrote for early issues of n+1, a number of which appear in Against Everything, are actually indebted to a different intellectual tradition. They read as if the Roland Barthes of Mythologies, or the LA-exiled Theodor Adorno of Minima Moralia, were deposited amid post-millennial American culture”. * Brian Dillon on the history of word processing: “This review is being drafted with a German fountain pen of 1960s design – but does it matter? Give me this A4 pad, my MacBook Air or a sharp stick and a stretch of wet sand, and I will give you a thousand words a day, no more and likely no different. Writing, it turns out, happens in the head after all”. * Brian Dillon on Brexit: “In its buildings, theatre and cinema, in its music and cuisine, in the brief prospect of al fresco socializing and sexual license that it conjured, the seaside resort was an image in microcosm of a fantastical, desired Europe”. * Irish writers (including Dillon) react to Brexit. * Tom McCarthy vs Brexit. * Tom McCarthy joins the “Ship of Fools”! * Tom McCarthy, the nude artist’s model. * Art school sketches of Iggy Pop in the nude. * Jacques Vach é‘s not dead. * An interview with Adrian Sherwood. * Our Joanna Walsh: against the novel. * Joanna Walsh interviewed by Rob Doyle. * The Manifesto: from Surrealism to now. * The little-known Maeve Gilmore. * In search of the real Maeve Brennan: “something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page”. * Walter Benjamin‘s tales out of solitude. More here. * WG Sebald‘s collected maxims. * The anticriticism of Jonas Mekas. * The return of Geoff Dyer. * Geoff Dyer at London Review Bookshop (podcast). * An interview with Geoff Dyer. * Geoff Dyer on the startling beauty of scarecrows. * White Sands reviewed: “I don’t know how to define the book. It is neither exactly fact, nor precisely fiction”. * On White Sands: “Like Kraftwerk in the 1980s, Dyer is now in the position where the world is catching up with what he has long been about”. * Will Self’s writing routine. * Will Self introduces Solaris. * Will Self on the meaning of life. * Will Self on Britishness. * Will Self: what’s wrong with modern art? * Simon Critchley on Memory Theatre. * The Kitchen at 40. * Chris Power on Lucia Berlin‘s “hardboiled domesticity”. * Sarah Bakewell on her At the Existentialist Cafe. * “François Dosse is keen to portray his subjects [Deleuze and Guattari] as visionaries, but they anticipated a future neither of them would have wanted to live in.” *Revisiting Land art. * Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. * His other struggle: Knausgaard, the publisher. * Knausgaard on James Joyce’s Portrait. * Michael Bracewell on the Collin Fallows Ensemble. * Reading with Woolf. * Maurice G Dantec R.I.P. More here. * Bill Cunningham R.I.P. More here. * Jenny Diski R.I.P. * Jenny Diski‘s In Gratitude reviewed. * Anne Enright on Jenny Diski: “Oblivion was something Diski craved, all her life – she travelled to Antarctica to find a place that was truly blank. Writing too was a kind of ‘nothing'”. * An interview with Stephanie Danler. * William Boyd on Jacques Henri Lartigue. * The Bothy Project. * George Shaw‘s My Back to Nature exhibition: “We ourselves are part of nature, the stains of our lust and violence belong in a painted forest now as much as they did when Poussin painted a nymph touching herself while a satyr takes a peep” (Jonathan Jones). More here. * The wild beauty of Georgia O’Keefe: “‘I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.'” * David Bowie, “the missing link, as the book wryly suggests, between Sammy Davis Jr and Samuel Beckett”.
