Activity

At the end of the day, the kids made a presentation to the broader conference, announcing, to Gilmore’s surprise, that in their workshop they had come to the conclusion that there were three environmental hazards that affected their lives most pressingly as children growing up in the Central Valley…

Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The impli…

Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of…

Nanni Balestrini’s novels have meant a great deal to me over the years. Formally, stylistically, they are in a category alone. Until I discovered them, I had often wondered if a novelist needed to have contempt for humanity, à la Céline, to have a great style. Style and cynicism—the ability to sati…

The narrator gets sick leave but discovers that he has no idea how to deal with free time, how to relax or what to do in Turin. The factory not only degrades work; it degrades life away from work. This is alienation, the lived experience of exploitation, but it is demonstrated here without theoreti…