The 2015 Guggenheim Fellows have been announced; winners include Jeffery Renard Allen, Meghan Daum, Alex Ross, Cathy Park Hong, Percival Everett, Rivka Galchen, and Kevin Powers.
At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Leslie Jamison considers Chris Kraus’s work and how Kraus has resisted the idea that her novels are confessional (Kraus’s 2006 novel Torpor was reissued by Semiotext(e) earlier this year). Jamison quotes Kraus saying that she wants to address vulnerability “at some remove,” and looks at the ways in which Kraus’s genre-resistant writings use scenes from her real life as a way to seek larger truths: “Kraus insists that all sorts of experience—even romantic obsession, dependence, and desperate pursuit, stereotypically ‘female’ states of abjection—hold universal significance. . . . She wants to push back against the limited ways in which vulnerability and self-exposure are read.”
At AWP, Claudia Rankine read a poem for Walter Scott. On Matter this week, a list of those killed by police in 2015; so far, they’ve only found one day with no names to record.
Heidi Julavits talks about her new book, The Folded Clock: “There’s a lot of mortality contemplation in this book . . . in an unserious, lighthearted manner. We’d never want to take mortality too seriously.”
Verso Books might assume that development expert Jeffrey Sachs’s favorite novel would be the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but Sachs has now revealed to economist Tyler Cowen that in fact he’s a “complete sucker for Doctor Zhivago”.
Rafa Fernandez De Castro writes that UNAM, Mexico’s vast public university, is trying to sex up reading with a promotional video and the hashtag #PerreaUnLibro (#GrindABook).