Bookforum

Octavia “Butler called out bigotry unflinchingly; she also imagined futures in which we have so thoroughly dismissed the crude prejudices of racism, sexism, and anti-queerness that we can learn to embrace that which seems Other, such that it ceases to be Other at all.”

Jeff Sharlet explores hate and Trumpism in America.

“A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive.”

In looking at David Yaffe’s, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, Carl Wilson argues that Joni’s musical talent and accomplishments have been “asterisked” over the years because she was a girl, and that it’s long past time she got the recognition she deserves for pushing musical and cultural boundaries with songs built on her “chords of inquiry” (unique chords based on her own tunings).

The first and final chapters of Orson Welles’s complicated career.

Review of a Twitter joke turned book—which reveals the worst about class and creativity: “The premise is closer to ‘What if a lower- or middle-class person wanted to write a novel?'”

For certain elite readers, the best seller is valuable primarily as a means of calibrating literary taste: We know what is good in part by knowing what is bad. But the sheer ubiquity of the best seller makes it impossible to disregard so easily. If some books are good (read: literary) because they don’t sell, others are just as likely to be judged good (read: entertaining) because they do. “If I’m a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste,” Metalious once said.