For the Washington Post Magazine, Jacob Brogan reports on the decline of academia from this year’s sparsely attended Modern Language Association convention: “Surveying the state of the field, one might be wiser to find something, anything else to do—yet intelligent, well-informed people still enroll in graduate programs every year, sometimes even tromping off to conferences amid a pandemic.”
Lambda Literary has announced the finalists of its 2022 Lammy Awards in LGBTQ literature. The honorees include Lauren Groff for Matrix, Brontez Purnell for 100 Boyfriends, Tiphanie Yanique for Monster in the Middle, Torrey Peters for Detransition, Baby, Melissa Febos for Girlhood, among others. The winners will be revealed at an online ceremony on June 11.
For Harper’s Magazine, Lauren Oyler writes about Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, internet novels, and the erroneous critical tendency to seek “thesis statement[s]” from fiction. A sequel to Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad, the new novel catches up with Bix Boulton, now the creator of a social network called Mandala and technology that lets users access their memories and those of their peers. “Although the presence of a connection machine here doesn’t fundamentally alter the kinds of relationships Egan focuses on—among families, exes, co-workers, and drug dealers and their customers,” Oyler writes, “it does make the book feel different, and probably worse, in a helpless and inevitable kind of way.”
“Russell was too gentle to be difficult, too serious to be pop, and too prolific to pick a lane.” For Observer, Sasha Frere-Jones offers an appreciation of Arthur Russell, the late musician, singer, and producer who worked in multiple genres and whose 1994 album Another Thought has been newly mastered for CD and vinyl.
The essays in Contemporaries at Post45’s new cluster on the online subculture of dark academia, edited by Olivia Stowell and Mitch Therieau, approach the subject by asking whether the aesthetic might also be an emergent literary genre.
