As the Merce Cunninghman Dance Company concludes its final tour in New York, writer Alma Guillermoprieto remembers her former instructor: “Merce insisted throughout that his dances were not abstract: ‘I have never seen an abstract human body’ he often remarked. He himself danced like a man on fire.”
The New York Times publishes Sam Anderson’s year in marginalia, highlighting the critic’s best in-book scribblings. Lines from an Anne Carson poem get a “LOL,” while a note in Anderson’s copy of The Pale King reads, “DFW + Dostoevsky: investigative journalists of self-consciousness.”
For its inaugural column about feminist academics, Feministing interviews New School media studies professor Kate Eichhorn, who is working on an archive of queer feminist zines and small press publications.
Author Adam Johnson recalls his 2007 trip to North Korea, and what it was like to be in “a country with no books.”
Tin House staff select their favorite debut novels of 2011: Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints, Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and John Franc’s Hooked all get nods, as do Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! and Marcus Jackson’s Neighborhood Register.
