At the New Yorker, Joy Williams looks at the photographs of Curran Hatleberg, which were taken mostly in northern Florida: “The atmosphere is weary, post-consumerish. No one seems to possess anything. The men and boys are often shirtless, the cars cannibalized. There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey.”
Post45 Contemporaries has collected a series of appreciations for historian and activist Mike Davis’s work, with contributions by Madeline Lane-McKinley, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Eric Avila, and Megan Tusler.
A recording of Sigrid Nunez’s T Book Club talk with Kate Guadagnino about Paula Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters is available online now. The novel begins with Sophie Bentwood being bitten by a stray—and possibly rabid—cat; readers are “kept in suspense,” Nunez has written, as to “why Sophie, an intelligent and educated woman, would rather deny the problem, even as her hand swells and throbs, than seek medical advice.”
For The Nation, Apoorva Tadepalli considers the collected diaries of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, which “reveal a moment-by-moment kind of life, in which the secret history of a squat brown pear or a rogue faucet or a chafing dish may be just as significant as the public life of the writer.”
4Columns is on summer hiatus, but this week they share a collection of archival reviews “that pair critics with the most worthy of opponents: other critics.” Read Jennifer Krasinski on Gary Indiana’s Fire Season, Brian Dillon on Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, and more.
