At the Barnes and Noble Review, Patricia Lockwood talks about her new memoir, Priestdaddy. The book is about her father, a Catholic priest who got a pass on the celibacy rule from the Vatican because he was a married Lutheran minister before converting (Lockwood calls her existence a “human loophole”). In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner writes that “Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris.”
Vice is launching a new project, News Issues, a semi-regular digital magazine that takes on a single subject. The effort represents a turn back toward a print magazine sensibility. As Vice News editor in Chief Ryan McCarthy notes: “Magazines, traditionally, are really good at unifying on a certain topic, bringing you from one story to another, and giving you an overall aesthetic. . . . The web traditionally has been pretty bad at that and I think to some extent readers are underserved by it.”
Today, PalFest, or the Palestinian Festival of Literature, gets underway in Haifa. Authors appearing at the festival, which runs until May 18, include Solmaz Sharif, Jelani Cobb, Natalie Diaz, Nadeem Aslam, and Eileen Myles.
A new exhibition at the Morgan Library suggests that Emily Dickinson was less of a recluse than received wisdom would have us think.
At the Boston Review, Junot Diaz talks with Samuel R. Delany about his memoiristic essay “Ash Wednesday,” which details Delany’s experiences at gatherings for older gay men called “Santa Sex Parties.” When asked if he considers himself a sexual radical, Delany tells Diaz, “Intellectual radicals, rather than actual radicals, are people who say things where they are not usually said. And, yes, all true radicalism has to begin in the body—so being a sex radical means you have to be ready to act radically and be willing to speak about it in places you ordinarily wouldn’t.”