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Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair; Los Angeles’s Mezzanine film series and Semiotext(e) host a tribute to critic Serge Daney

Serge Daney. Photo: Jean-Paul Fargier/Wikimedia Commons

The T. S. Eliot Prize has announced its shortlist of ten new poetry collections. The winner will be announced in January. 

Printed Matter’s 2022 NY Art Book Fair started yesterday and will continue all weekend on 22nd Street in Manhattan. The fair has a full slate of events, special projects, and programs, including a free block party on Saturday. The exhibitors include galleries, magazines, booksellers, artists, collectives, and more. 

Los Angeles’s Mezzanine film series is hosting a tribute to the French film critic Serge Daney on Sunday. Ticketholders will receive a zine by Semiotext(e) Press featuring Christine Pichini’s translations of writings on Daney by Marguerite Duras, Jackie Raynal, and more. In the current issue of Bookforum, Beatrice Loayza reviews a new collection of Daney’s criticism, also translated by Pichini and published by Semiotext(e). 

At The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone explores “Why Bad Catholics Make Great Art.” Considering Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and more, Ripatrazone writes, “Nostalgia enables these artists to first romanticize—and therefore exquisitely evoke—faith, while also pivoting to authentic criticism that is smart and often biting.” 

In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Merve Emre traces the emergence and trajectory of the personal essay. Emre discusses Walter Benjamin’s ideas on subjectivity and the formation of the private individual, Virginia Woolf’s 1905 “The Decay of Essay Writing,” the anti-Semitic origins of the personal essay as a college admissions requirement, Jia Tolentino’s 2017 “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over,” and more.