In a piece about the recently deceased Ben Bradlee, Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann describes the former WaPo editor’s memorial service and notes: “Part of what made the scene at the cathedral a bit harrowing in its palpable longing to continue worshiping the fallen editorial hero of the Watergate years is that today’s Washington Post is just a shadow of its former self.”
At the Telegraph, Rupert Hawksley writes that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists—based on a Ted Talk she gave in 2012, “might just be the most important book you read all year.”
Later this week, an exhibition of William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups will open at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York. In addition to hand-edited drafts of pages from the Nova Trilogy, the show will feature Burroughs’s cut-ups—pages that the author cut, shuffled, and pasted to a page to achieve his singular nonlinear style.
In a new essay called “Delusions of Whiteness,” Cathy Park Hong identifies the racist strains of avant-garde poetry, grapples with the challenging dilemmas that poets of color face, and recommends that writers chart new territory: “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.”
PEN America has launched a new website for First Editions/Second Thoughts, for which seventy-five authors and artists personally annotated their own books. Highlights include Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning, John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ed Ruscha’s Past Stuff. Some of the handwritten annotations are quite elaborate, such as the ones on the TOC page of George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, which incorporates footnotes and various colors of ink. The works will be auctioned at Christie’s on December 2.