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The Center for Fiction and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are hosting a discussion of Diane Oliver’s posthumously published short story collection, Neighbors. The February 21 event with guests Jamel Brinkley, Lan Samantha Chang, and Dawnie Walton will also be live-streamed.
At the Paris Review, Rosa Lyster writes about Janet Flanner, who covered the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi occupation of France, and the evacuation of Paris, among other subjects, as the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent from 1925 to 1975. Flanner’s writing was “sharp, fearless, and always informed by an awareness of her audience, whom she never talks down to but addresses with the assumption that they are as smart as she is. The pleasure that comes from reading her prose is often accompanied by a kind of relief that here, finally, is an actual adult.”
On February 22, The Baffler and the Brooklyn Art Museum will present a screening of Rosa von Praunheim’s 1986 film A Virus Knows No Morals, “an episodic, parodic, and offbeat Brechtian skewering of the greedy, vicious German response to a brand-new AIDS crisis.”
Literary Hub has published an excerpt from Sheila Heti’s new book Alphabetical Diaries, which Heti wrote by transcribing, alphabetizing, pruning, and reorganizing sentences from ten years of her journals. From the “D” chapter: “Dad’s wrists were so skinny, thin and weak, and he said it was because the platelets were gone from all his operations and illness. Dante’s Inferno. Dating is terrible. Daydreaming like this, I fell off my bike on Shaw, missing a dip in the road and losing control of the bike, and smashed up my knee.”
