“The alert and sensitive reading of the best literary works by a significant proportion of the population, willing to be surprised and changed by the experience, could be said to constitute a social good, even though in my view — since opening oneself to otherness is always a risky business — there can be no calculation in advance of what benefits might accrue (and there is always the possibility that some events of reading might have a negative effect).” Francesco Giusti asks theorist Derek Attridge about the work of literature.
“Isaac Bashevis Singer — the famed Yiddish writer who in 1935 moved from Warsaw to New York and in 1979 received the Nobel Prize for Literature as an American-Jewish author — made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955, arriving just after Yom Kippur and leaving about two months later.” David Stromberg writes about Isaac Bashevis Singer’s relationship to Israel and introduces his new translation — the first into English — of Singer’s story “In the Beginning,” which appears in the “Genius” issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal.
“I was never interested in writing a memoir — becoming an essayist even came out of years of fiction. I knew no other way to approach it than with honesty so I went there, all the way. There is no other way to write a memoir of illness and addiction, without vulnerability.” Kavita Das interviews Porochista Khakpour, the author of Sick: A Memoir.
On BLARB, Apoorva Tadepalli reconsiders her relationship with Brooklyn Nine-Nine and with cop shows in general.
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