Weekly Round-Up (23 Nov 2016)

This is the thirteenth in a series that brings together the articles, reviews, interviews and miscellany that has caught my eye over the past seven days. Including: twenty questions with Lydia Davis; writers respond to the election of US President Trump; and the final volume of Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography is published in English translation. Take a look, and feel free to share!

Literature, Poetry, Theatre

• Why Criticism Matters: An Interview with Catherine Belsey
• Ann Quinn and me
• “Three centuries on, we need the satirical edge of Jonathan Swift more than ever
• Rest in peace, William Trevor: one of the short story masters of our time
• Perfect Sunday reading: Zadie Smith‘s By the Book
• “Life is not a perfected art.” An interview with Zadie Smith
• Franz Kafka’s boyhood experiences of his father’s brutish behaviour fed the nightmarish fictions of his adult life
• The uncanny inner world of Franz Kafka gave us the 20th century’s most imperishable fables about disorientation, guilt and absurdity.
• Toni Morrison flawlessly breaks down the frail and desperate state of white superiority in America
• Having a New York Public Library card means having a 300,000+ book library on your phone
• Samuel Beckett’s Harrowing Family Vigil
• Matthew Feldman on Samuel Beckett’s Letters
• Interview with editor Dan Gunn on Samuel Beckett’s Letters (Vol.4)
• Letters editor Martha Dow Fehsenfeld remembers Samuel Beckett
• Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism
• David Foster Wallace postcard to Don DeLillo: “I’m in contact with Franzen who’s been charged the task of a…Gaddis piece by the NYer and is struggling with it.”
• Germany buys California home where writer Thomas Mann lived in exile
• Jorge Luis Borges selects 74 books for your personal library
• Marguerite Duras: Negative Hands | English translation
• Garth Greenwell discusses how he took solace from James Baldwin’s Paris novel Giovanni’s Room as a teenager
• Twenty Questions with Lydia Davis
• The Art of the Blurb
• Leo Tolstoy‘s Anna Karenina turned into a musical
• David Pelham on designing some of the most iconic incarnations of J. G. Ballard‘s book covers
• The difficult, brilliant D. H. Lawrence

Art, Design, Photography

• Celebrating the Rise of Superwomen
• David Pelham on designing some of the most iconic incarnations of J. G. Ballard‘s book covers
• Reconsidering Francis Picabia: The “playboy prankster” of modernism is at the centre of a new MOMA exhibition
• There are still undiscovered secrets hidden in the artwork to David Bowie’s Blackstar
• The influence and effect of Caravaggio’s “blurring of the boundaries between ideal and real, high and low”
• Racheal McCaig‘s evocative photographs of Canada’s Vimy monument chosen for centennial ceremony
• A teenaged Stanley Kubrick‘s photos for LOOK magazine, 1945-50
• Every exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented in a new website: 1929 to Present
• How Ilse Bing‘s seminal Self-Portrait with Leica became an icon of modernist photography
• Can the design of your city change your mind?
• Moebius and Beyond: An Introduction to European Comics
• Original Tintin Explorers on the Moon drawing sells at auction for £1.3million
• Helen Lundeberg’s Sixties-Era Abstract Paintings
• John Lewis‘ National Book Award-winning graphic memoir is an introduction to the art of principled dissent
• UCC Library Acquires John Minihan Photographic Archive
• Female artists have long been pegged as personal. “Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss”
• Broken, Defaced, Unseen: The Hidden Black Female Figures of Western Art
• How Berenice Abbott documented the most prominent figures of 1920s Paris

Philosophy & Theory

• “All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write.” —Elie Wiesel
• Why Criticism Matters: An Interview with Catherine Belsey
• Angela Davis and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in conversation
• How Martin Luther King, Jr. used Hegel, Kant & Nietzsche to overturn segregation in America
• Watch a “Lost Interview” with Michel Foucault: missing for 30 years but now recovered

Music

• Producer Tony Visconti breaks down the making of David Bowie’s “Heroes”, Track by Track
• There are still undiscovered secrets hidden in the artwork to David Bowie’s Blackstar
• The only known footage of Louis Armstrong in a recording studio: watch the recently-discovered film (1959)
• Leo Tolstoy‘s Anna Karenina turned into a musical

Film & TV

• Celebrating the Rise of Superwomen
• “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True.”
• A teenaged Stanley Kubrick‘s photos for LOOK magazine, 1945-50
• Alfred Hitchcock, aka “the ‘239-pound Englishman’” to Hollywood heavyweights
• Metropolis: watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Masterpiece
• Andrei Tarkovsky creates a list of his 10 Favorite Films (1972)
• Time, beauty, transience: the remarkable output and influence of Studio Ghibli

News & Politics

• Racheal McCaig‘s evocative photographs of Canada’s Vimy monument chosen for centennial ceremony
• Toni Morrison, Atul Gawande, Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart … 16 extraordinary essays on Trump’s win
• John Lewis‘ National Book Award-winning graphic memoir is an introduction to the art of principled dissent
• They Can’t Kill Us All asks why the burden of proving the value of black lives is placed on the dead
• “Where memory leads: Saul Friedländer on the Holocaust, history and Trump“
• A reminder about the internment camps at the National Japanese American Memorial
• Supermoon 2016

Miscellaneous

• Download 100,000 Photos of 20 Great U.S. National Parks, courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service
• How Darwin, Freud And 14 Other Brilliant Minds Scheduled Their Days
• Biography in the Twitter age: what happens when social media replaces diaries?