Paper Trail

Margo Jefferson on questioning her writing self; New York Times Guild says a work stoppage is likely


Margo Jefferson. Photo: Claire Holt

A work stoppage on Thursday from members of the New York Times Guild is likely. Last week, over 1,000 union members pledged to walk out on the job if management does not agree to a fair contract by December 8. 

The new issue of the Yale Review features work by Windham-Campbell Prize winners, including Margo Jefferson, who contributed an essay on “questioning my writing self more pointedly.” In particular, Jefferson scrutinizes her “need for elective affinities” and to rebel against “a writer who helped make you possible.” 

Issue 44 of n+1 magazine is online now, with an “Intellectual Situation” from the editors on “cardboard modernism” and why new construction in New York City is so often ugly. Also in the “Middlemen” issue: essays by Charlotte Shane and Laura Kolbe on abortion, Blair McClendon on Godard, Gabriel Winant on Barbara Ehrenreich, and more. 

The Paris Review’s winter issue is also out now. N. Scott Momaday and Colm Tóibín are the latest subjects of the Art of Poetry and the Art of Fiction interviews, respectively. 

For Vulture, Sarah Chihaya reviews Eat Your Mind, Jason McBride’s biography of Kathy Acker. McBride “acknowledges that he finds it impossible to write a ‘complete’ biography, citing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (a book that Acker also made use of in 1982’s Great Expectations): ‘A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.’” For more on Acker, see David Velasco’s Bookforum review of Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker