The Guardian’s Alison Flood reports from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s acceptance lecture for the PEN Pinter prize yesterday. “Art can illuminate politics. Art can humanise politics. Art can shine the light towards truth. But sometimes that is not enough,” she said. “Sometimes politics must be engaged with as politics. And this could not be any truer or more urgent today. . . . We must know what is true. And we must call a lie a lie.”
Maggie Gyllenhaal is writing, producing, and directing a movie based on Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. Gyllenhaal says she spent a “few weeks” writing a letter to Ferrante about possibly adapting the book into a film. “She came back and said, ‘You can have the rights, but you have to direct it. I’m only giving the rights to you to direct.’”
In the New York Times Magazine, Angela Flournoy profiles director Barry Jenkins, who is currently working on a movie adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk.
Vulture has ranked all twenty-two of Haruki Murakami’s books that have been published in the US.
Tana French talks to CrimeReads about gaslighting, whether women writing crime fiction is a feminist act, and her new book, The Witch Elm. “A lot of the books I’ve seen described as ‘feminist’ seem to me to be about universal issues, dealt with through the experience of female characters. If I define that as intrinsically feminist, I’m defining the character as first and foremost a woman, rather than a human being,” she said. “If a book deals with a universal issue from a male character’s standpoint, we assume that it says something to and about all humanity; his gender only becomes a defining element of the discussion if he’s dealing with something that’s heavily male-specific.”