[Audio] Zadie Smith reads Frank O’Hara’s poem “Animals” (quite beautifully, we might add): I wouldn’t want to be faster / or greener than now if you were with me O you / were the best of all my days
Deborah Weisgal on the “Mother of All Girls’ Books”: “Little Women is brutal, a ferocious wolf dressed up in the curly white sermons and sentimental homilies of children’s stories. Though full of references to a kind and loving father, its fundamental faith lies not in God but in books: in life as a literary construct.”
Anis Shivani asks, “What Should Be the Function of Criticism Today?”: “What is missing, then, is a vital criticism that is neither theory—a mundane exercise in proving, over and over, that all texts are unstable because of inherently contradictory meanings—nor the renewed form of aesthetic criticism emanating from workshop writers, which recalls the state of criticism before the establishment of “scientific” principles of objectivity by New Criticism in the 1930s.”
Kevin Stevens on Saul Bellow’s Letters: “It is his stories we treasure, not his politics. And his correspondence supports our hope and belief that writing novels is necessary and worthy, and must be refreshed within each generation by works that seek to adapt the form’s strengths to the demands of the times. Bellow’s challenge was to find his voice while breaking through establishment prejudice and hardened notions of form – whether European formalism or the tough-guy simplicity of Hemingway and his followers – as he made himself into a great American writer.”
