At LitHub, an essay on the late writer Stephen Dixon, who died in 2019. Courtney Zoffness remembers Dixon as a teacher at Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, a caring, authentic presence who students could hear banging away on a manual typewriter. Writing about Dixon’s work—he was extremely prolific, with nearly seven-hundred short stories and thirty-five books—Zoffness observes, “Steve has a distinct, frenetic, unsentimental writing style, one attuned to the humdrum of daily life. His characters are profoundly humane.” The new issue of McSweeney’s has more on Dixon, including four previously unpublished stories and an essay on the writer by Porochista Khakpour.
Pankaj Mishra has published an email exchange with the CEO of Penguin Random House India in the London Review of Books. In light of recent debates regarding “the cruelty and callousness of powerful men” within European and American publishing houses, Mishra asked Gaurav Shrinagesh whether PRH India’s decision to publish Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book was preceded by larger internal conversations. “His response, or non-response, exemplifies a pattern of obfuscation and lack of responsibility,” writes Mishra, “and has compelled me to make this exchange public.”
Peniel E. Joseph reviews Yale scholar of mass incarceration Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Hinton “reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath,” challenging the use of the word “riot” to describe violent clashes that, in her words, “can only be properly understood as rebellions,” and contextualizes “not only the Black Lives Matter protests” but also the state of America’s contemporary law-enforcement system.
For the Paris Review, Molly McGhee writes about the cruel absurdity of debt, and reading Gogol in the early days of the pandemic: “Shortly after I picked up Dead Souls, my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that the surrealism of Gogol was not so surreal after all. Chichikov knew more of life’s truths than I did: no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead. The poor are worth more dead than alive.”
In the New York Times Magazine, Charlotte Shane writes about OnlyFans: “Every assertion that the site isn’t powered by porn is accompanied by an onslaught of winks and nods to the contrary. Sometimes the denials and winks come from the same person.”
Tonight at 6PM EST, NYU is hosting Eric Weisbard, who will talk with Ann Powers about his forthcoming volume, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music.
