Rene Ricard—the artist, critic, and poet—has died. Ricard appeared in films by Andy Warhol and wrote influential Artforum articles about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Francesco Clemente; his poetry collections include God with Revolver.
At Hyperallergic, Morton Hoi Jensen reports on Triple Canopy’s third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
When the FBI arrested the man who founded Silk Road on drug-trafficking charges, many people who frequented this online black market were faced with a crisis: Where to continue their book club? In a trend worthy of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, literary discussions are thriving on the Deep Web.
The literary magazine VQR has a spiffy new website, and to celebrate, they’ve suspended the paywall for the next two weeks, freeing articles that are well worth a read, including Jeff Sharlet on Harry Belafonte, Richard Nash on the business of literature, Francine Prose on the hindu deity Sri Ganesh, among many others.
Jacket Copy has a slideshow from this weekend’s LA Art Book Fair. A conversation with Adam Klein on his new anthology, The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan, which emerged from a writing class Klein taught in Kabul. Klein says of the importance of fiction to the country’s rebuilding: “Imagination is central for post-conflict cultures: they have to change the narrative. This is never done by agreeing on one national hero or one specific aspect of the history, but by providing a voice for the many local and ethnic perceptions.”