Weekly Round-Up (19 Sept 2016)

This is the fourth in a new weekly series that brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: a review of the fourth and final volume of Samuel Beckett’s Letters; how to spot a communist using literary criticism; five films that influenced David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; and successful authors offer their best writing tips. Take a look, and feel free to share!

Literature, Poetry, Theatre

• Music & Literature celebrates the work of Welsh-born writer Paul Griffiths
• How to spot a communist using literary criticism
• Successful authors offer their best writing tips
• An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel
• The Evening Standard reviews the fourth and final volume of Samuel Beckett’s Letters
• An Irishman’s diary on Samuel Beckett‘s harrowing family vigil
• Playwright Edward Albee dies at 88
• Playbill pays tribute to Edward Albee
• Craig Lucas interviews Edward Albee
• The Paris Review‘s interview with Edward Albee
• On Tracy Letts in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Annotations and illustration’s for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
• Old book, new look: why the classics are flying off the shelves
• Three fragments from the Selected Work of Franz Kafka
• A postcard from W. G. Sebald
• Critical essays on W. G. Sebald
• Actress Lisa Dwan on Beckett, gender, and performance
• Which Russian writer are you?
• What “Orwellian” really means: an animated lesson
• Read all of George Orwell‘s war diaries online
• Mbolo Imbue: An exciting new voice in African literature
• New Agatha Christie stamps deliver hidden clues
• Finding the unsayable in translation
• John Banville on his hero, Flann O’Brien
• A poet’s mission: Buy, and preserve, Langston Hughes‘ Harlem home
• Flannery O’Connor: A reading primer
• Mark Twain’s favourite comfort foods
• 10 Siegfried Sassoon poems everyone should read
• William Faulkner reviews Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
• Shirley Jackson’s Haunted Womanhood
• Margaret Drabble: Why I was wrong about Georges Perec
• Why you should read Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day
• Penguin Classsics will publish Jean Rhys‘ unfinished autobiography this November
• Paul Auster’s City of Glass to come to the stage in 2017
• David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech
• Mark Twain wrote the first book ever written on a typewriter

Art, Design, Photography

• Teju Cole on photography
• MoMA will make thousands of exhibition images available online
• The influence of poetry on artist Cy Twombly
• What a reissued 1990s graphic novel can tell us about life and activism in 2016
• The feminist architect who tried to liberate kitchens from houses
• The Art Institute of Chicago mobile experience
• David Bowie’s secret passion for Irish painter Jack B. Yeats
• How French artists in 1899 envisioned the year 2000
• The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art

Philosophy & Theory

• Peter Singer on how to live an ethical life
• Why the Frankfurt School is back in fashion
• The history of Albert Camus‘ existential classic, The Stranger
• Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein

Music

• On Iggy Pop: where punk rock begins
• A 1932 illustrated map of Harlem’s night clubs
• Wynton Marsalis on music, the internet, and attention spans
• Leonard Bernstein‘s lectures on music
• The history of spiritual jazz
• Radiohead’s short film contest

Film & TV

• Lisa Stead talks about Women Writers at the Movies
• Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is a new novelist
• The BFI offers 5 films that influenced David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
• Twin Peaks: Tim Roth on working with David Lynch
• Every Netflix original series, ranked
• See Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with a live orchestra
• The problem with comparing serial TV to the novel
• Ranking every John Le Carré adaptation

News & Politics

• Riz Ahmed: Typecast as a Terrorist
• Civil Rights icon John Lewis is a National Book Award finalist
• The Black Panthers and Gay Rights
• The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in this month

Miscellaneous

• The needless complexity of academic writing
• Women in Research are anything but boring

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