The winners of this year’s Whiting Awards for emerging writers were announced this week: You can read extracts from their work at The Paris Review’s website, or you can hear them read in person tonight, at BookCourt. (The Whiting Foundation is also offering a substantial new grant to help writers of creative nonfiction complete their books—applications are open now.)
Maggie Doherty’s New Republic piece on Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (reissued this month by Columbia University Press) begins with the author vomiting all over a Persian rug she’d just bought in a fit of “libertine glory” after selling the book to Doubleday, and would be worth it for that alone. Millett, Doherty also notes, “was writing in the waning years of what Louis Menand has called the age of ‘heroic criticism,’ a time when the stakes of literary debate seemed high. The books you preferred said something about your politics, even your morals. If you wanted to change the way people lived and loved, you might very well set out to change the way they read.” It’s not easy, as Doherty points out, “to imagine any work of literary scholarship—let alone a Ph.D. dissertation—landing its author on the cover of Time today.”
The Rumpus interviews the writer Amy Sohn, who incidentally will ruin your view of Law & Order’s Jerry Orbach, and who sees motherhood and literature as mutually beneficial, in a manner of speaking: “It really opened me to a new kind of deeper writing, I think. In other words, I suffered for the first time in a really big way, and I became depressed for the first time. . . . I wrote about the darkness of marriage, the darkness of being triangulated about your own child. So I had kind of a crack-up, and it helps if you’re an artist, because nobody’s going to question you.”
An excerpt from The Money Cult, Chris Lehmann’s forthcoming history of the relationship between capitalism and American Christianity, appears at Melville House: “Protestant piety in United States has had an often fulsome, occasionally fraught, relationship to the quest for material wealth, but never before has it transacted a vision of spiritually sanctioned prosperity on such a blunt pay-to-play basis on such a vast scale. In the not-so-distant past, Oral Roberts—the most prominent prosperity minister in the postwar era—was treated as a late-night TV punchline for mounting a bald fundraising pitch around the threat that the Lord would be calling Roberts home if he failed to meet his allotted quota of $8 million to rescue his eponymous Oklahoma-based university from a sea of red ink. Now, however, the link between the personal discipline exacted by one’s faith and the promised expansion of one’s bottom line is so casually reiterated in the evangelical world that it’s banal.”
The writer Sarah Schulman has written on Facebook about her strange experience this week with the authorities at CUNY, where (at the College of Staten Island) she teaches and serves as faculty advisor for the Students for Justice in Palestine.
If you haven’t been reading the daily entries in the “literary/graphic project” Web Safe 2k16, edited by Josephine Livingstone, you still have time to catch up: It’s been live for just over a month now, with 216-word contributions about life on the pre-broadband internet (and with other technologies of the same era) from the likes of Adrian Chen, Jenna Wortham, Haley Mlotek, and Sarah Nicole Prickett, and it’ll run for 216 days altogether.
