Critic and novelist John Berger—whose influential works include About Looking, The Shape of a Pocket, and G—has died at the age of ninety. For those new to Berger’s work—or anyone looking to experience his particular genius—the BBC series Ways of Seeing is worth watching.
In The Guardian, Alex Preston previews fiction to be published in the coming year, with new novels by Paul Auster, Katie Kitamura, and Arundhati Roy (with her first book of fiction in twenty years), among many others. Preston notes that in 2017, storytellers will have their work cut out for them: “One’s heart goes out to the contemporary American novelist, for whom daily reality seems to outstrip the reach of both satire and dystopia.”
The New York Times looks at Jonathan Lethem’sarchives, which he recently sold to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Lethem donated his collection of letters, notes, and drafts (one alternate title for Motherless Brooklyn was Jerks from Nowhere), as well as comic books he drew in childhood (starring “Fig Leaf Man”), a sticker from the set of the 1979 dystopian film The Warriors, and more than a few drawings of vomiting cats. About this last category, the novelist explains: “For about 15 years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about 2 a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat. . . . I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.”
MSNBC news host Joe Scarborough is feuding with journalist Sopan Deb on Twitter about whether his appearance at a Trump event on New Year’s Eve qualifies as “partying” with the President elect. At the Washington Post, Callum Borchers writes that this kind of intramural squabbling is what the media needs to avoid as they ready themselves to cover Trump’s first term.
Zadie Smith talks about male critics, the merits of White Teeth, and why she finds the Trump children interesting: “What I find so painful is the idea of children competing for the affection of a narcissist, whose affection they will never receive. That seems to me just excruciating. That’s what boggles my mind: Reading interviews with them where they boast about who gets to call him in his office more regularly or who saw him more than four times during their childhood.”
