Literary publicist Lauren Cerand is joining the staff of the journal A Public Space, where she will act as Marketing and Development Director.
Tomorrow at the Brooklyn Public Library, authors Porochista Khakpour, Idra Novey, and John Freeman will discuss Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, whose The Chandelier has just been published in English for the first time (in a translation by Benjamin Moser). Also tomorrow: Two amazing novelists, Lynne Tillman and Colm Toibin, will appear at McNally Jackson to discuss Tillman’s new book, Men and Apparitions.
At Splinter, Paul Blest revisits some of the opinions expressed by Kevin D. Williamson, the author of The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome who was recently hired by The Atlantic to write for the magazine’s new Ideas section. Among other things, Williamson has written that “the the law should treat abortion like any other homicide,” and that Laverne Cox is “not a woman.” Says Blest: “There was no reason for The Atlantic to hire Williamson.”
Luc Sante—author of Low Life and The Other Paris—reconsiders The Kinks’ 1967 album Something Else. Kinks singer Ray Davies was, Sante writes, “establishing himself as a sensibility—an auteur—at a time when the Beatles were still addressing themselves to teenagers and the Rolling Stones still working their way through the Chess back catalog.”
In his latest “Interesting Times” column, Andrew Sullivan (Virtually Normal; The Conservative Soul) analyzes the Trump presidency by borrowing some insights from Plato’s Republic. Sullivan, like Plato, worries that “late-stage democracy, dripping with decadence and corruption, with elites dedicated primarily to enriching themselves, and a people well past any kind of civic virtue,” is just a short step away from tyranny.