In the “New Books” column at Harper’s Magazine, Claire Messud writes about Gary Indiana’s essay collection, Fire Season: “It’s true that Indiana’s work can feel not wholly contemporary, insofar as it refuses ever to be nice. This, thank goodness, ensures its timelessness.”
Today is the first full day of programming at the AWP conference and bookfair, which is being hosted this year in Philadelphia. You can browse the panels on offer here.
Fireflies Press has announced Dennis Lim’s new book, Tale of Cinema, on Hong Sangsoo's film of the same name. The title, the fourth in the publisher’s Decadent Editions series, will be released in April, corresponding with a retrospective of Sangsoo’s work at Film at Lincoln Center in New York.
In “The World Was Just an Address,” A. S. Hamrah rounds up the 2022 Oscar films for The Baffler. Writing about the ceremony, Hamrah observes, “The atmosphere in which the highest honors in filmdom are now broadcast to the masses is more like an episode of Wheel of Fortune in which the contestants can’t solve the puzzle, no matter how many vowels they’ve bought.”
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, will join the New York Times in April as an Opinion columnist and staff writer for the Times’s magazine covering technology and the climate crisis.
For the New York Times Style Magazine, M. H. Miller considers the history of artists who abuse drugs and asks whether that tradition is coming to a close: “The act of becoming intoxicated—of getting high, buzzed, loaded, bombed, blitzed, wasted, turned on, hopped up, etc.: a practice now distinguished from using, which leads to addiction—has largely become a question of self-optimization.”
