In the Yale Review, Aria Aber interviews poet Fady Joudah. Joudah wrote his latest book, [...], in about ten weeks beginning in October 2023. He tells Aber, “Palestinians are much more than a repository of wounds; portraying us as such can’t lead to much more than pity.”
On the Verso Books blog, Katie Tobin writes about Simone Weil, the Catholic mystic Marxist philosopher and author who died at age thirty-four in 1943. Weil has seen a resurgence lately, featuring prominently in Jacqueline Rose’s recent book The Plague, Octavia Bright’s memoir This Ragged Grace, and Lars Iyer’s new novel, My Weil. While Weil seems freshly relevant to every generation that has come of age after her death, it is not always clear what to make of her, as Tobin writes, “While lucid and moving, seldom was her work logical, and her reputation among scholars and activists remains contentious.”
Tomorrow night, The American Library in Paris is hosting an in-person and online event with Brian Dillion, who will talk about his recent book, Affinities.
In the new edition of 4Columns, Jennifer Krasinski reviews Tricia Romano’s new oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. Krasinski writes of the Voice, “If there was a single ethos that unified its contributors across generations (and there wasn’t), it might be summed up as see bullshit, set it on fire. Was their writing righteous? Always. Litigious? Sometimes. Incorrect? Almost never.”
