John Williams

The first, startling epigraph in Nicci Gerrard’s new book, “The Last Ocean,” comes from Emily Dickinson: “Abyss has no Biographer.” Gerrard sets out to tell the story of dementia, a disease that can appear to consume those it afflicts. After her father, John, died in 2014, the author — who writes best-selling thrillers with her husband under the name Nicci French — embarked on learning more about the disease as both a journalist and an activist. The result is a tender, inquisitive tour of a subject that can be raw and painful. Below, Gerrard talks about loss, art that punches you in the solar plexus and the experience of writing a book that doesn’t answer questions.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

I first had the idea when my father, who’d been living with dementia for over 10 years, went into hospital in February 2014. After four weeks without anyone to see him — we were allowed in for very limited times and then not at all, because of a norovirus outbreak — I barely recognized him. I will, for the rest of my life, feel terribly that I didn’t get him out earlier. Then he lived at home for nine months. He had become skeletal, immobile, inarticulate, and in a way he felt utterly lost, like a ghost in our lives and in his own life. He would lay downstairs in a hospital bed, looking outside at the garden he used to love.

There was this clear sense that he’d already lost everything he had, everything he was, all his capacity; there was nothing left — and yet somehow that he didn’t lose himself. In the book I say that if I were religious, I would call that self he retained his soul. Something very indelible remained.

And witnessing that, I knew there was a book I could write about how mysterious it is to be human, really. But I absolutely didn’t think there was a book I would write. I didn’t want to write a memoir; my father was a very private man, and my family’s quite private, and there are lots of wonderful memoirs. So instead of writing what I’d been through, I launched this campaign for better care for those who go into hospital. For three or four years, I spent my working days talking to doctors, nurses, carers and, above all, people living with the illness. I knew I had to find a way of making that into a book full of lots of different voices and stories. I didn’t want to write a book that was certain and had answers. I wanted to write a book that was full of questions and feelings.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

It changed the way I thought about so many different things — about being alive, actually. If I had to think of one thing that knocked me back: I became more optimistic and less scared about getting old, becoming frail, than I had been before I started. There was nothing redemptive about Dad’s last months; it was just cruel and awful. I went to see an autopsy of someone who had had dementia, and the person conducting it pointed to these myriad bits of the brain where dementia can occur. There are hundreds of different kinds of dementia. Some people have impaired brains, but they show no sign of dementia; it’s only at death that you see they had the condition. And others with dementia seem, at death, to have a healthy brain. So it’s a very mysterious disease, which is why it’s hard to find the cure. You probably have to find hundreds of cures.

But I’ve seen people with it who live with a sense of spiritual adventure, who refuse to be ashamed, who manage to hold on to themselves and live with endurance and lack of self-pity and go bravely into the night. And I’ve seen so many carers bearing the unbearable and holding onto love. I thought writing the book would be painful, and it was, but it made me realize just how extraordinary people can be.

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

I didn’t know what book I was setting out to write. I knew it would follow the stages of self-loss and be full of other people’s voices and stories as well as my own, and be a book of uncertainty and doubt. I knew I wanted it to be very emotional and intimate but also dispassionate and philosophical. But when writing is going well, it leads you to places you didn’t know you were going to go.

I set out partly to make a confession to my father, but I didn’t know what that confession would be. I knew the journey in a big way, like when you look at a map and see the road, but then when you set out there are forests and ditches and floods.

Since it was published, it’s changed again. It’s changed radically for me. I’ve been going around the country doing talks and interviews, and in the end, I haven’t experienced anything like it as a novelist. People get up and instead of asking a question, they start crying. And they start saying things out loud that they’ve never said to anyone, in front of a roomful of people.

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

Käthe Kollwitz. She was a German artist and a socialist and pacifist and grandmother. She lived through both world wars. She lost her son in the first and her grandson in the second. She made the most extraordinary prints and sculptures about the deprivations of war and about female suffering. The first time I saw her work, I’d never heard her name. I walked into this art gallery in Berlin and thought I’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Her works are often in black and white, and they’re very strong portrayals of women grieving. There are lots of self-portraits that look right into and through you. They’re scary. And tender. She’s my hero. Men often act and speak, and women are the ones who mourn and bear witness. She did both.

Persuade someone to read ‘The Last Ocean’ in 50 words or less.

Dementia is everywhere: if not you, then someone you know. This is a book about being vulnerable, frail, at the mercy of others. It’s also full of stories of courage, love, hope, even joy. It’s about what it is to be human, what it is to say goodbye.

Publication Notes:

‘The Last Ocean: A Journey Through Memory and Forgetting’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/books/nicci-gerrard-last-ocean-dementia-interview.html" id="74ff17ec-2bd5-3680-a72b-c16c1daf8ad0">The New York Times</a>.

'The Last Ocean' Considers Dementia in All Its Uncertainty

(5 Things About Your Book)

Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s teenage years overlapped almost precisely with the official beginning and end of World War II. Her father was a Nazi. The one novel Bachmann finished, “Malina,” is very much a war story, if not in conventional ways.

Originally published in German in 1971, and in English first in 1990 and now in an extensive reworking by the same translator, Philip Boehm, “Malina” is also a psychological thriller of a tormented, existential sort. And it’s a love triangle, though a triangle most accurately drawn with dotted lines, given that it’s debatable how many of its members are real.

The unnamed narrator, a female writer, lives in Vienna with a man named Malina who works at a military museum, and she is conducting an affair with a Hungarian man named Ivan, who lives nearby and has two young children.

The first of the book’s three distinct sections, its longest, is devoted primarily to the narrator’s relationship with Ivan, whom she met outside a florist’s shop.

She implies that love is a “virus,” and thinks: “I’ve accumulated more antibodies than you need to be immune — mistrust, indifference, the fearlessness which comes from too much fear, and I don’t know how Ivan coped with such resistance, such impregnable misery.”

There are brief flashes of the narrator’s wartime trauma in this first section — memories of being evacuated to a border town in 1945, and of someone threatening to shoot her and a young friend — but this trauma fully lights up the book’s blazing second section. It’s a stunning stretch, filled with the recounting of vivid nightmares, which include gas chambers and incest and being slowly poisoned.

The narrator dreams of being left alone to die in a gas chamber after her father disappears through a door he hadn’t shown her. “While I am dying my wish to see him once more and tell him just one thing dies as well,” she writes. “My father, I say to him who is no longer there, I wouldn’t have told anyone, I would not have betrayed you. There’s no resistance going on here.”

In this section, in a technique that will begin to appear more frequently throughout the rest of the novel, the narrator and Malina have conversations formatted as scripts.

“Malina: There is no peace in you, not even in you.

“Me: Don’t say that, not today. You’re terrible.

“Malina: It’s war. And you are the war. You yourself.

“Malina: We all are, you included.”

It’s worth noting, before the anguish piles up too high, that Bachmann can be funny, her humor another shade of darkness on her palette.

“Sometimes a person gets lucky, but I’m sure most women are never lucky. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with the supposition that there are some men who are good lovers, there really aren’t,” she writes. “At most there are men with whom it is completely hopeless and a few with whom it’s not quite so hopeless.”

You might wonder while reading “Malina” who is really in it and who isn’t. Rachel Kushner, in a new introduction to the novel, writes: “The male characters in the book, some have speculated, are mere alter egos, not ‘real’ men, but part of her own psyche.” One can make a convincing case that Malina especially is, in fact, just a facet of the narrator’s mind.

“He never forgets,” the narrator writes, “I never have to ask him to do anything.” When Ivan suddenly asks, “Who is Malina?” she thinks, seeming more stumped than secretive: “I don’t have an answer for that.” In lines frequently cited as evidence, she writes: “I don’t want to lead Ivan astray, but he’ll never realize that I am double. I am also Malina’s creation. Unconcerned, Ivan sticks to the appearance, my living bodily self gives him a reference point.”

Reading Malina this way, he seems like a civilizing drive inside the narrator, for better and worse — both protecting her from the full rawness of her traumatic memories and wanting her to begin making an uneasy peace with them.

Ivan, given his children and other details, seems more reliably corporeal, but who knows. Nothing is nailed down in this book, not even at the very end. Its terse and chilling final line lands with enduring ambiguity. (Bachmann planned this to be the first in a trilogy, but the other books were unfinished when she died, at 47, from injuries sustained in a fire at her apartment.)

Taken in bites, Bachmann’s prose is often lucid and powerful, enlivened by her poetic gifts. At length, she can be tough chewing. She wrote a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger and was a devoted reader of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” though she’s nowhere near that tough. For every aphoristic dart she throws at the human condition (“the world is sick and doesn’t want a healthy force to prevail”), there is a sentence or meaning that remains tightly knotted, and a general lack of clear orientation prevails. Whatever verifiable facts about the plot and characters might exist beneath the novel’s psychological static, you can imagine Bachmann insisting, are none of your business.

The churn of the narrator’s mind and the absurdist exchanges between characters earned the novel comparisons to Virginia Woolf and Beckett. This revised translation appears at a time when the book feels quite contemporary. Though even innovative mainstream fiction now being published reads like “A Is for Apple” compared to “Malina,” there’s no question that the book shares a spirit with any and all books about the unsought psychological challenges of being a woman in this world. (“Can a man understand this book? Completely,” Kushner writes in her introduction, which gave me the courage to continue.)

“Women face an unhappiness which is particularly inevitable and absolutely unnecessary,” the narrator says. She envisions that she will become “an unknown woman murdered by some unknown man.” The specters not just of the father figure, but of fascism and patriarchy on scales large and small, hang over every line of the novel.

Like a lot of existential literature, “Malina” has digressive depths and charms impossible to summarize in such a small space, including the start of its final section, which begins: “At the moment my greatest fear may be the fate of our postal officials.”

In the closing pages, the narrator’s thoughts accelerate toward breakdown. “I am completely incapable of thinking straight, but who ever did think straight?” she wonders.

Her racing confusion seems to confirm something Malina has earlier explained to her: “Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding.”

Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.

283 pages. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/books/review-malina-ingeborg-bachmann.html" id="e24f2ed1-1125-3676-ad53-f6041f285c8e">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

A Postwar Love Triangle in Which One Character May Be Pure Fantasy

Orange was speaking at the third annual Believer Festival, three days of performances, panels and parties that are part of a growing literary scene here. As high-low splits go, it is a tough scene to beat.

With irregular regularity, various places in the United States that are not the Big Obvious Centers start throwing off a more concentrated number of cultural sparks: Austin, Texas; Seattle; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Atlanta. Las Vegas might not seem the most obvious place to join this list. The Strip is still, and ever shall be, as Joan Didion described it, “bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.” But a recent infusion of money, people and The Believer, a literary magazine, have kindled an already present bookish community into a steadier flame.

The hub of this resurgence (or, to coin a term, surgence) is the Black Mountain Institute, a literary center that operates out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. When Joshua Wolf Shenk became executive and artistic director of the institute in 2015 — after the retirement of Carol Harter, who founded BMI in 2006 — he was not planning to also become editor-in-chief of a magazine. But soon after beginning his tenure, Shenk talked to The Believer, then published by McSweeney’s and based in San Francisco, about cooperating on a live event in Vegas.

Those talks grew into discussions about the institute, also known as BMI, buying the magazine, which was in a dormant phase as it tried to find a viable long-term financial model. A deal was finalized in early 2017.

Shenk said that defying what outsiders expect from Vegas was no longer what interested him most, but he and others continually admit that the juxtapositions can be hard to ignore. And one person’s very conscious fight against stereotypes has done much to fund the growth.

Beverly Rogers, a patron saint of the arts in Las Vegas, moved to the area from outside Philadelphia when she was 12. Now 68, and a serious book collector, she remains motivated by the view others have of her longtime home.

“Since I was a kid, I had been sick of going back to my family and friends and have them make some snide remarks about living in Las Vegas, how there’s nothing intellectual going on here,” Rogers said. “I can’t tell you how many insults I suffered over the years. So I’ve always had what I call a desire to raise the cultural barometer of Las Vegas.”

The Rogers Foundation, which focuses on arts and education, pledged $10 million to BMI in 2013. Not long after Rogers’ husband, Jim, a lawyer and television station owner, died in 2014, the foundation pledged another $20 million to the institute, which now officially bears the names of both Rogers and Harter.

“Everyone’s head is so full with the stereotype that I don’t think there’s any room for anything else,” Shenk said of Las Vegas. “There’s no substitute for coming here. You have to move through the environment to get a sense of what it’s actually like.”

The festival heavily emphasizes environment, staging its events against backdrops that are away from the Strip but still quintessentially Vegas — in both artificial and natural senses. The opening night, with readings by Kiese Laymon, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz and others, was held at the Neon Museum’s Ne10 Studio, a dark warehouse space strewn with classic signs. Near the entrance, a larger-than-life reclining cowgirl kicked her blazing boot into the air. On Friday night, just outside the city, readers performed in Red Rock Canyon at sunset, holding their own in a contest for attention with the glowing mountains.

Both the lineup of talent and the crowds at the festival reflected a city that, it is often said, is what 21st-century America looks like.

“The stereotype of Vegas is all white dudes swinging into the Strip and treating the city as a plaything for their imaginations,” Shenk said. “But the real city is incredibly diverse.”

Talk to a dozen people in Las Vegas, and 13 of them will tell you the city’s University of Nevada campus is the most ethnically diverse in the country, as ranked by U.S. News &amp; World Report. (Some will quickly acknowledge that, technically, the school is tied with Rutgers.)

Journalist Amanda Fortini has spent the better part of four years in Las Vegas, as a visiting lecturer at UNLV and, for the past few months, a BMI fellow.

“There’s one misperception that Las Vegas is the Strip, that they’re an equivalent thing,” Fortini said. “But another misperception is that there’s this organic, local community wholly separate from the Strip — that there’s no cross-pollination between the two.”

For Justin Favela, a Las Vegas-born artist who appeared at this year’s festival, the city’s outsize dimensions help to spur his vision. “Most of my work is inspired by Las Vegas,” he said. “The colors that I use; the scale. I’m not afraid to make giant, obnoxious things that take up space and draw attention.”

The Believer is not an outsize magazine — its average issue sells 6,000 copies, including paid subscribers and in bookstores — but it is an influential and well-branded one. Sara Ortiz, the program manager for the magazine and BMI, moved to Las Vegas not long after she had returned to her hometown, Austin, from New York. Certain she was back in Texas for good, she said she was lured away in large part by the “name recognition” of the magazine.

Now, in addition to planning the festival, Ortiz coordinates about 50 events year-round for BMI and oversees the institute’s many fellowships, including its City of Asylum program, which hosts writers who face censorship, and sometimes violence directed at them, in their home countries. Egyptian journalist and novelist Ahmed Naji recently began his term as the City of Asylum fellow, and will be in Las Vegas for at least two years.

The final day of this year’s festival featured a series of signings and talks, including the interview with Orange, at The Lucy, a recently opened mixed-use complex owned by the Rogers Foundation that serves as a home for the BMI crowd.

On ground level at the complex is The Writer’s Block, a store that bumped its stock from about 5,000 books at a previous location to about 20,000 in the current one. On the upper floors are apartments for BMI fellows and any Believer editors who live outside Vegas full-time but spend stretches there to work on the magazine.

When Scott Seeley and his husband, Drew Cohen, who own and run The Writer’s Block, were first thinking of where to relocate from New York in 2013, Vegas “was not even on the radar,” Seeley said.

Seeley is an artist who designed two visually distinctive stores for McSweeney’s in Park Slope, Brooklyn. For 10 years, he also ran 826NYC, the nonprofit founded by Dave Eggers that offers free creative-writing programs to children. In Las Vegas, Seeley has started his own program, Codex, for students ages 5 to 18.

It is an irony not lost on him that, having been at ground zero of the McSweeney’s-flavored Brooklyn moment at the start of this century, he moved to the desert for a change of pace — only to have The Believer move in upstairs.

But he is happy to have the magazine around, and the scene finding him again has helped his business in more ways than one. “Publishers had been reticent to send authors to Vegas because books never sold,” Seeley said. “The Believer coming here legitimized this city in the eyes of the machine out there.”

So far, any new attention from the machine has not changed the fundamental tone of the place.

When comedian and musician Reggie Watts closed the Red Rock Canyon event with a riotous set that included him adopting the persona of a pretentious poet, there was a ripple of surprise and almost relief that someone was having such unabashed fun. The local participants and audience members at the festival betrayed few pretensions, but there was an unquestionably sincere vibe throughout the weekend.

“My theory is that everything attracts its shadow,” Shenk said, “and that quite unconsciously, people who live in Las Vegas have developed a way of being that is in 180-degree contrast to the stereotypes of their city. It’s a relentlessly earnest, authentic, sometimes painfully earnest place. It’s not an ironic place. People are not commenting on the comment.”

In this way, the city is a perfect match for The Believer. In a long essay, much talked about at the time, that anchored its debut issue in 2003, Heidi Julavits wrote: “Snark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not,” and that the real questions we need to ask are: “What do you believe in? What do you care about?” These are questions that permeated this year’s festival, which had the theme of “La Frontera,” or the border, and featured several readings and conversations revolving around issues of social justice and the history of oppressed peoples.

“Thank you, believers,” author Lolita Hernandez said as she took the stage at Red Rock Canyon, “for keeping believing.”

So, how to keep on keeping the faith? “We’re in many ways still a baby festival,” Ortiz said. “We’ve learned that we really do well with an intimate crowd. I don’t ever want us to get on the scale of something crazy-large.”

Shenk said the festival was thinking about “how to expand without losing the thing that people want us to expand.”

The long-term future of the whole scene depends on not just artists, but on much more fundamental things — like water. “If Lake Mead holds up, we can all be here long term,” Fortini said, with a dark laugh.

Some of the parched city’s other potential drawbacks are less apocalyptic in scale. Author Lesley Nneka Arimah, a fellow at BMI this spring, said she was trying to figure out where she would live next. And while she has enjoyed her time in Vegas, there are features she could do without. “Tarantula season is July,” she said. “I’ve been foolishly soliciting tarantula stories from people.”

But the overall sense is of a creative community with plenty of room left in its growth spurt. More than one person compared Las Vegas to the Wild West, not for its zaniness or licentiousness, but because its culture’s clay is still wet.

“The first Believer Festival, at the first activity, I started to cry,” Rogers said. “I realized it was because I didn’t know anyone. Everyone there was young. I’m in this crowd, I see the same people all the time. These were people who were really interested in what was going on, and I didn’t know them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/books/believer-black-mountain-institute-literary-las-vegas.html" id="ef906282-1464-398d-a83a-1986441dad79">The New York Times</a>.

LAS VEGAS — On a recent very warm Saturday afternoon, just a few blocks northeast of a string of ramshackle chapels offering Elvis-themed weddings on Las Vegas Boulevard, novelist Tommy Orange was discussing the critical reception given to “There There,” his polyphonic novel about contemporary Native Americans.

Vegas as a Literary Hub? You Bet

Journalist Silvana Paternostro was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, where Gabriel García Márquez congregated with friends and fellow writers, several of whom became characters in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Paternostro had moved to the United States as a teenager before she grasped García Márquez’s towering importance. Later, she would attend a journalism workshop led by the author. In writing “Solitude &amp; Company,” her oral history of the Nobel Prize winner’s life before and after he found fame, she learned that several people closest to him (friends called him Gabo) had essentially taken a vow of silence to protect his privacy, “as if you were in the mafia.” Paternostro talks about finding plenty of others who would talk, García Márquez’s superstitions and discipline, and more.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Q: When did you first get the idea to write this book?

A: I got the idea to do the book in 2010, and it came out in Spanish in 2014. But it had been gestating without me being aware of it in many ways. I was born and grew up in the exact geographical area where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” takes place. I would hear stories about him and his friends; they were a crazy bunch, like our own Beat poets. My uncle knew them. I went to school with some of their children.

When Tina Brown started Talk magazine, she did a section of oral history. I got a call from the magazine in 2000, saying “We want to do an oral history of García Márquez, would you be interested?” I was, of course.

It was a magazine piece, 2,000 words, but I just couldn’t stop my tape recorder. I knew there was this pact among people who would not betray his friendship. But there were others — everyone had an encounter with García Márquez.

Talk closed before the oral history appeared. I published it in The Paris Review.

In 2010, by chance, I saw García Márquez at the inauguration of a museum in Mexico City. He didn’t look so well. There were thousands of people there: the president of Mexico; the richest man in Mexico. And I saw how thousands of people, instead of going up to them, all went to García Márquez. With love. My heart skipped a beat, and I was curious: Who was this who had turned into our Latin John Lennon? So I think the book was born that day. I realized that I needed to give it more of a structure, so I went out and did a second round of interviews.

Q: What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

A: I was really surprised that he was as superstitious as he was — that he didn’t attend funerals, even of his friends. Some people maybe begrudged the fact that he didn’t go, but he was really superstitious and panicked by it. These are little things, but they’re very telling.

The one big thing that really struck me was his discipline. Because I know where we come from, where pranksterism and Caribbean laissez-faire are the rule of the day. This young boy who grew up with really very little in his favor turned out to be the man who put Latin American literature on the map. And he wanted to; it wasn’t a fluke. He told himself that he would write a book that would be as important as “Don Quixote,” and he did.

Q: In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

A: There are people that have spent most of their lives as Gabo experts. I don’t think I’m a Gabo expert. I had a curiosity in understanding the man before and the man he became later. But along the way, I became the repository of all these incredible stories, and I felt it was almost my obligation to share them. Especially in this English version, I did something I didn’t do in the Spanish: I included things that would make readers understand Colombia. It turned into a book that explains our music, the violence, the idiosyncrasies of the region. When I was growing up, it was red alert: Don’t go. Now that Colombia has become a travel destination, the book, while it’s not a travel guide, is a companion to travel to Colombia with.

It also became a perfect, fun thing to have if you want to go read his books again. It became many, many things more than the magazine story I set out to write.

Q: Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

A: I am in awe of ballet dancers. I took many ballet classes in my youth. I spent a lot of time in Panama. Margot Fonteyn, who to me was the epitome of the elegance of ballet dancing, was there, and she brought a lot of incredible dancers to Panama. So I had the great privilege to see a lot of amazing ballet dancers live. When I was just a young intern at a Panama newspaper, Alexander Godunov was going to dance “Don Quixote,” and I asked my editor if I could go interview him. And I did. I waited for him to come out, a summer intern with a tape recorder and a photographer. He was exhausted but agreed to sit with me. It was my first interview.

I admire so much the rigor and the discipline it takes to become a professional dancer, and the strength the body needs to create the beauty of those movements. After a long day at the writing desk, I will play around with my dance moves and stretch like a dancer.

Q: Persuade someone to read “Solitude &amp; Company” in 50 words or less.

A: You’ll come to one of the best parties you’ve ever been to, privy to uncensored stories from those who knew García Márquez, including some naughty gossip. You’ll hobnob with a former president and incredible writers. You’ll learn about the process of writing and the nature of friendship.

“Solitude &amp; Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told With Help From His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls”

Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

Illustrated. 336 pages. Seven Stories Press. $26.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/books/solitude-company-gabriel-garcia-marquez-silvana-paternostro-interview.html" id="48f5f302-8bce-3ee5-af81-0674fa3ba5a8">The New York Times</a>.

(5 Things About Your Book: Silvana Paternostro)

The Down Low on Gabriel García Márquez

The New York Review of Books has installed two editors to lead the magazine after being without a top editor since the sudden departure of Ian Buruma in September. Rea Hederman, publisher of the intellectual journal, announced Monday that Emily Greenhouse, 32, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost, 33, have been named co-editors, and that Daniel Mendelsohn, a longtime contributor to the Review, will assume the newly created role of editor at large.

The shared-power arrangement echoes the history of the magazine, which was founded in 1963 by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and edited by the pair until Epstein’s death in 2006. Silvers then maintained control of the publication — with monomaniacal focus, by all accounts — right up until his death, at 87, in 2017.

The announcement of the new editors comes more than five months after Buruma, Silvers’ successor, left his position amid an uproar over the publication and ensuing defense of an essay about the #MeToo movement by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian radio broadcaster who had been accused of sexually assaulting women. Soon after Buruma departed, the magazine issued a statement acknowledging “failures in the presentation and editing” of the essay.

Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost both have experience at the storied publication they will now lead. Greenhouse was most recently the managing editor of The New Yorker. She worked at the New York Review in 2011 and 2012, as an editorial assistant to Silvers. Winslow-Yost began working at the Review, also as an editorial assistant to Silvers, in 2009, and moved up the editorial ranks to become a senior editor.

Given the fallout over the Ghomeshi essay and the widely noted gender imbalance among the magazine’s contributors, there was speculation that a woman would succeed Buruma. In 2017, women wrote about 23 percent of the pieces published in the Review, according to nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Greenhouse (whose father, Steven Greenhouse, was a longtime reporter for The New York Times) said that addressing the reality reflected in the VIDA count will be part of her mission.

“I consider that a great priority, and that’s been a focus for me as a young woman,” she said. “I think it’s extremely important not only for the counts, but to represent the world more fully and more exactly.”

But Emily Greenhouse also emphasized that this was “no wrecking ball moment,” and that she envisioned the job as “a combination of stewardship and continuity and reinvigorating something.”

Hederman said he began the search for Buruma’s replacement intent on naming two editors, rather than one, but with no set idea about gender. “It could have ended up with two women; it could have been two men,” he said. “We ended up with the best candidates.”

Silvers and Epstein founded and built the magazine organically, making their chemistry a difficult thing to re-create. But Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost believe that their own longtime friendship, and most importantly the time they spent working together for Silvers, will help them share power.

“Working as an assistant at the Review is a tag-in, tag-out experience, and you necessarily establish a trust,” Greenhouse said. “Gabe and I met eight years ago now, maybe longer, and we have a real trust in our relationship.” Asked to describe his relationship with Greenhouse, Winslow-Yost simply said: “We’re friends.”

In separate interviews, both editors said they don’t expect to divide the workload into separate subject areas, aside from a few exceptions.

“He knows more about physics than I do,” Greenhouse said.

“She speaks French, and I do not,” Winslow-Yost said.

“But I would consider both of us generalists,” Greenhouse said. “I think we will make decisions together.” Greenhouse, who is expecting her first child next month, said the timing of the new job is “radically shocking” for her.

“Some things will sort themselves into one half of the head or the other, as we go,” Winslow-Yost said. “But the idea is not to divide things into two camps, which is, as I understand, how Bob and Barbara did it. They had to agree on every piece that went in, even if it took weeks of hammering out.”

Hederman said that Mendelsohn, in his role, would be in the office perhaps one day a week (“maybe more, that’s up to him”), and that his longtime relationship with Silvers, the Review and many of the magazine’s contributors could only help the younger co-editors as they begin their term.

“It’s been hard,” Winslow-Yost said of the time since Silvers’ death. “The whole place was conceived around him; the way the physical space worked. All of that was based around the very idiosyncratic and not replicable way he worked. It’s taken a while to learn how to function as a magazine without him there.”

He went on to say that “one person can’t do it in the way it needs to be done,” and that the past five months without a top editor have been “an incredible period of people sharing responsibility” and a model for how things will look going forward.

Greenhouse said that some of the changes she envisions at the magazine are not radical but things that others, including The New Yorker, have done, like podcasts, newsletters, events and more outreach on college campuses.

A news release announcing the new editors also mentioned that the first prizes of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation will be awarded at the end of 2019. These prizes — ranging in value from $15,000 to $30,000 — are designed to support writers working on “in-depth political, social, economic and scientific commentary, long-form arts and literary criticism and the intellectual essay.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/books/new-york-review-names-2-top-editors-five-months-after-ian-burumas-departure.html" id="646b3406-b2c3-3284-a4de-dc5bda470a14">The New York Times</a>.

(Books News)

New York Review of Books Picks Editors

The shared-power arrangement echoes the history of the magazine, which was founded in 1963 by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and edited by the pair until Epstein’s death in 2006. Silvers then maintained control of the publication until his death in 2017.

The announcement comes more than five months after Buruma, Silvers’ successor, left his position amid an uproar over the publication and ensuing defense of an essay about the #MeToo movement by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian radio broadcaster who had been accused of sexually assaulting women. Soon after Buruma departed, the magazine issued a statement acknowledging “failures in the presentation and editing” of the essay.

Greenhouse was most recently the managing editor of The New Yorker. She worked at the Review in 2011 and 2012, as an editorial assistant to Silvers. Winslow-Yost began working at the Review, also as an editorial assistant to Silvers, in 2009, and moved up the editorial ranks to become a senior editor.

Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost believe their longtime friendship, and the time they spent working together for Silvers, will help them share power.

“Working as an assistant at the Review is a tag-in, tag-out experience, and you necessarily establish a trust,” Greenhouse said.

In separate interviews, both editors said they don’t expect to divide the workload into distinct subject areas, aside from a few exceptions.

Hederman said Mendelsohn, in his role, would be in the office perhaps one day a week, and that his longtime relationship with Silvers, the Review and many of the magazine’s contributors could only help the younger co-editors.

The New York Review of Books has installed two editors to lead the magazine after being without a top editor since the sudden departure of Ian Buruma in September. Rea Hederman, publisher of the intellectual journal, announced Monday that Emily Greenhouse, 32, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost, 33, have been named co-editors, and that Daniel Mendelsohn, a longtime contributor to the Review, will assume the newly created role of editor at large.

New York Review Names 2 Top Editors Five Months After Buruma's Departure

The shared-power arrangement echoes the history of the magazine, which was founded in 1963 by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and edited by the pair until Epstein’s death in 2006. Silvers then maintained control of the publication — with monomaniacal focus, by all accounts — until his death, at 87, in 2017.

Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost both have experience at the storied publication they will now lead. Greenhouse was most recently the managing editor of The New Yorker. She worked at the Review in 2011 and 2012, as an editorial assistant to Silvers. Winslow-Yost began working at the Review, also as an editorial assistant to Silvers, in 2009, and moved up the editorial ranks to become a senior editor.

“Working as an assistant at the Review is a tag-in, tag-out experience, and you necessarily establish a trust,” Greenhouse said. “Gabe and I met eight years ago now, maybe longer, and we have a real trust in our relationship.”

Reading Andrew S. Curran’s “Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely” will, among other things, make you feel very lazy. On a typical day, Curran points out, Diderot might “write on ancient Chinese and Greek music first thing in the morning, study the mechanics of a cotton mill until noon, help purchase some paintings for Catherine the Great in the afternoon, and then return home and compose a play and a 20-page letter to his mistress in the evening.”

Denis Diderto, an 18th-century French philosopher (he was called “le philosophe” by his contemporaries; “the philosopher,” not “a philosopher”), was the most famous atheist of his generation. He edited the “Encyclopédie,” for which he wrote 7,000 articles. He was also an art critic, a novelist, a political writer and a satirist, though much of this was known only long after his death. He wrote dozens of manuscripts that he meant to be discovered after he was gone, hoping and trusting that future generations would better sympathize with his more radical thoughts.

Below, Curran talks about grave robbers, Diderot’s political prescience, how he was like Benjamin Franklin and more. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

A: It starts in 2013, with The New York Times, when I wrote an Op-Ed about Diderot’s 300th birthday. Right after that happened, Other Press contacted me and said, “Do you want to write a biography?” I jumped at the chance. I had had it in the back of my mind that it would be great to do something different than what was out there. All the biographies had been 700 pages, 800 pages, and very useful and scholarly for people who study Diderot. But I thought that for somebody who was so interested in posterity, it was important to work for him and help him out with that posterity, to make him more accessible.

He’s so interesting and human. He’s vulnerable, open, complicated and very fun to read about. He’s like Montaigne or Benjamin Franklin, too, in that he can become your friend — a lifelong companion. My thesis adviser at NYU, who died last year, once told me the only man she has loved, other than her husband, is Diderot.

A: I always knew he was a workhorse, just an intellectual beast. But I really didn’t grasp how important he was as a political thinker until I worked on him. He went to Russia to speak with Catherine the Great, who was his benefactor, and tried to democratize the Russian empire. He didn’t get too far.

But later on — and this was discovered only in the 1940s — he was a ghostwriter for one of the best sellers of the 18th century, “Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies,” in which he tackled major subjects that were incredibly influential. He ultimately wrote about 20 or 25 percent of it. He criticized Louis XVI for income inequality. He said France was a powder keg that was going to blow up, nine years before the revolution. And he was also a great antislavery voice, around 1780. What’s remarkable is that he didn’t just say slavery is bad, he refuted all the racial stereotypes in a way no one else was doing at the time. The name of the guy who ostensibly wrote the book was Raynal; he got kicked out of France, whereas Diderot, who wrote the most incendiary parts, got to stay.

A: The most obvious way of tackling a life is what I call putting a tracer on the person and tracking them from the moment they’re born until they die. I started off that way. But after about a year, I figured out this wasn’t going to work for Diderot because so much of his existence was based on the idea of posterity. He made a huge bet, by putting these things aside, that people like us would ultimately read his unpublished works. One of the most revealing things he wrote was: “One only communicates with force from the bottom of the grave.”

After screwing up a lot of introductions (I have a huge compost pile) I opened the book with the story about grave robbers breaking into the church where he was buried, nine years after his death. They stole lead from his coffin, and tossed him out on to the floor. He had essentially been forgotten by then, while the other two figureheads of the era, Voltaire and Rousseau, had been reburied in the Paris Pantheon. But slowly his legacy started to shift. I flipped it and started there. I had to start where I could bring ideas of legacy and posterity to the fore.

A: One day in my early 20s, I was walking around the Paris Metro and I saw a cassette under a bench. I picked it up and saw the name Charlie Parker on it. I didn’t know who Charlie Parker was. I took it back to my apartment and just fell in love with it. I listened to it thousands of times. It became part of my brain.

He was a genius, for sure, but in his first gig, the drummer got ticked off and threw a cymbal at him. He went back and worked at his craft. There’s something that anyone who’s a musician or a visual artist or a filmmaker can aspire to: that unbelievable spontaneity that comes from really knowing what you’re working with. I know I’m no Charlie Parker, but he provides this model for hard work, initially, and later on, the kind of spontaneity that’s almost invisible.

Q: Persuade someone to read “Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely” in 50 words or less.

A: This is a book about a person who fought to change the way that people thought about everything in the 18th century: from religion to politics to human sexuality. It’s also a book about a sympathetic and complicated genius you’d die to spend time with.

“Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely”

Illustrated. 520 pages. Other Press. $28.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/books/diderot-art-of-thinking-freely-andrew-curran-interview.html" id="432ebafc-3e13-310b-a5f8-a018add35e90">The New York Times</a>.

A Busy Philosopher Who Eyed Posterity

The 18th-century French philosopher (he was called “le philosophe” by his contemporaries; “the philosopher,” not “a philosopher”) was the most famous atheist of his generation. He edited the “Encyclopédie,” for which he wrote 7,000 articles. He was also an art critic, a novelist, a political writer and a satirist, though much of this was known only long after his death. He wrote dozens of manuscripts that he meant to be discovered after he was gone, hoping and trusting that future generations would better sympathize with his more radical thoughts.

Below, Curran talks about grave robbers, Diderot’s political prescience, how he was like Benjamin Franklin and more.

A: I always knew he was a complete workhorse, just an intellectual beast. But I really didn’t grasp how important he was as a political thinker until I worked on him. He went to Russia to speak with Catherine the Great, who was his benefactor, and tried to democratize the Russian empire. He didn’t get too far.

But later on — and this was discovered only in the 1940s — he was a ghost writer for one of the best sellers of the 18th century, “Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies,” in which he tackled major subjects that were incredibly influential. He ultimately wrote about 20 or 25 percent of it. He criticized Louis XVI for income inequality. He said France was a powder keg that was going to blow up, nine years before the revolution. And he was also a great antislavery voice, around 1780. What’s remarkable is that he didn’t just say slavery is bad, he refuted all the racial stereotypes in a way no one else was doing at the time. The name of the guy who ostensibly wrote the book was Raynal; he got kicked out of France, whereas Diderot, who wrote the most incendiary parts, got to stay.

After screwing up a lot of introductions — I have a huge compost pile — I opened the book with the story about grave robbers breaking into the church where he was buried, nine years after his death. They stole lead from his coffin, and tossed him out on to the floor. He had essentially been forgotten by then, while the other two figureheads of the era, Voltaire and Rousseau, had been reburied in the Paris’ Pantheon. But slowly his legacy started to shift. I flipped it and started there. I had to start where I could bring ideas of legacy and posterity to the fore.

The world of TV now “barely resembles the one into which Tony Soprano’s SUV rumbled back in 1999,” critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall write in “The Sopranos Sessions.” “All the aspects of the series that once startled viewers have become accepted: serialization; narrative and moral ambiguity; antiheroes or villains as main characters; beauty for its own sake.” The book, being published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the show’s premiere, includes highly detailed recaps of each episode; several interviews the two authors conducted with the series creator, David Chase; a debate about the much-discussed final moment of the final episode; and writings by Seitz and Sepinwall that were published in The Star-Ledger, the New Jersey newspaper, when “The Sopranos” originally aired. Below, Seitz, the television critic for New York magazine, and Sepinwall, the chief television critic for Rolling Stone, talk about the show’s ambiguous finale, the nature of Chase’s recollections and more.

A: MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: I’m the creative director of the Split Screens Festival, and in our first year, 2017, we gave an award to David Chase. The event went well, and he was so lively and entertaining. With the 20th anniversary coming up, it seemed like a good time. And Alan was the person I wanted to do it with, since we had done so much about the show and had written together before.

A: ALAN SEPINWALL: It seemed like a good excuse to get together, and nostalgic because of the time we had spent together at The Star-Ledger. A lot of things we’ve written about wouldn’t exist without this one show. The anniversary definitely forced our hand and gave us an excuse to do it, and I’m glad it did, because I’m not sure when I would have rewatched the whole series, and wow, is it a great show.

A: SEPINWALL: We knew we were going to be talking to David Chase about the show, and that we were going to cover everything. And we kept asking ourselves: Is he going to say anything about the ending? We were strategizing and strategizing, knowing it would come up in the seventh of eight interviews we were doing. But in the sixth, I randomly asked him a question about preparing for the end, and he said “Well, I had that death scene in mind for years before,” and I didn’t want to say anything because I was afraid he was going to take it back. And Matt plunged in and said, “David, do you realize you just said ‘death scene’?” I don’t know if we have a definitive answer, because I don’t think that scene lends itself to one, but we talked much more about his intentions behind it than I ever thought David would do.

A: SEITZ: We didn’t get him to admit Tony died or anything like that. He was saying that the original intention was to have intimations that Tony died, but he moved away from that to something more philosophical in nature. But David would talk about things being intentional without really being intentional. I asked him: Is it possible that a lifetime of consuming gangster films where heroes die at the end left a flavor? And he said, “That’s possible.”

A: SEITZ: We fought to include samples of writing we did while we were at The Star-Ledger. I wanted some of that stuff to be preserved because a lot of it’s not available online. But also to give you a sense of how we were thinking about the show when it was new and there was nothing else like it.

We ended up breaking it up so that the stuff related to James Gandolfini was in its own section, and that made the book feel very sad and melancholy at the end. It leaves you with a sense of finality. Tony may or may not have died, but the guy who played Tony did, and that feels like the end.

A: SEPINWALL: I get very nerdy and detail-oriented. And I was going to ask Chase a lot of detailed questions: Why did this happen? Why did that? Tell me about this or that back story. But he often didn’t remember, or wasn’t interested in going into the details. It became much more talking about the feeling behind things. There’s definitely trivia in there. But a lot of it is just David Chase discussing his own creative instincts and how much comes from his gut, and I think that became a lot more interesting than the nerdy stuff I was focused on when we started.

A: SEITZ: I was surprised and moved by some of David’s recollections of his adolescence and childhood in New Jersey. There are some almost lyrical reminiscences in those parts of the interview.

A: SEITZ: Probably the biggest influence on this book is my therapist, Marc Kaminsky. I’ve been in therapy with Marc for 12 years, and in addition to being a fine therapist, he’s a fine poet. He psychoanalyzes me with a lot of literary references and scraps of poetry. That really works with a guy like me, who tends to frame things as if they’re a narrative. Psychoanalysis is a pretty good tool to have when you’re talking to any artist.

A: SEPINWALL: A high school teacher named Timothy W. Lynch. He currently teaches math somewhere in New Jersey. At the time I discovered him, he was teaching in Los Angeles, but he moonlit as a recapper of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” I discovered him in college, and I thought: Wait, you can talk about TV shows one episode at a time? Insert whatever mind-blown GIF you want. And somehow I made a whole career of that.

Q: Persuade someone to read “The Sopranos Sessions” in 50 words or less.

A: SEITZ: You get to put the show on the couch and be Dr. Melfi.

A: SEPINWALL: You have an excuse to revisit one of the greatest and most influential shows ever made. And you get a really dramatic peek behind the curtain of the man who made it and all those decisions, including the ending that you’re still arguing about 10 years later.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/books/sopranos-sessions-matt-zoller-seitz-alan-sepinwall-interview.html" id="d2fa6139-0614-3382-a305-fe9094db9e73">The New York Times</a>.

(Five Things About Your Book)

A Deep Dive Back Into 'The Sopranos'

Perhaps no imperative cliché is disobeyed more often than “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” And with good cause; you can learn a decent amount about a book this way. Take Elisa Gabbert’s “The Word Pretty.” Its deep blue cover, with its elegantly minimalist font and picture of a woman ambiguously hiding her face with her hands — is she crying or laughing? Ashamed? Repulsed? — manages to be both unassuming and striking, austere and inviting.

“The Word Pretty” is also of a surpassingly pleasing size. (We’ll get to its insides soon.) It is a book that can comfortably fit in your back pocket. This has been rigorously fact-checked using more than one pair of the reviewer’s jeans. Given the time of year, another useful unit of measurement might be the stocking, to which this book feels almost perfectly tailored.

All of these superficial elements — the visual appeal, the easy portability — are appropriate, because if the book’s contents were to be summarized in one word, the word might be “companionable.”

In this collection of brief essays, Gabbert, who is also a poet, draws inspiration for her musings from subjects like group selfies and the psychology of dreams and YouTube videos “designed specifically to make people cry.” She makes points about consumerism, self-image and the optimization of happiness.

But more than half of the book is explicitly devoted to books themselves; to life as both a purposeful and a serendipitous reader. Much of this material is winningly geeky and enthusiastic: “As front matter goes, I get especially giddy about translator’s notes, and for years I’ve toyed with the idea of editing an anthology of them.” And: “I’m obsessed with books about people who, for unclear reasons, ruin their own lives.” In the category of book titles, she disapproves of the “rhythmic sing-songiness” of those like “I Know This Much Is True” and “All the Light We Cannot See.” She adds: “As far as meter goes, I think spondees make for the best, snappiest titles: ‘White Noise.’ ‘Jane Eyre.’ ‘Bleak House.’ ”

Gabbert remembers picking up a book at the library, only to put it back when she realized it was written as “one long incantatory paragraph,” according to its cover copy. “I have no desire to read a book without paragraph breaks,” she writes. “A lack of white space on the page makes me feel a little panicky, like being on a train in an underground tunnel — what’s my exit strategy?”

More than once while reading “The Word Pretty,” I fondly remembered Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” published 20 years ago, with essay titles like “My Odd Shelf,” “Never Do That to a Book” and “Words on a Flyleaf.” Fadiman’s book came before, and Gabbert’s book comes after, the golden age of blogs, but they both share some of that medium’s strengths. They’re loose-limbed and low-stakes. There aren’t enough books like these. They offer the pleasure of personal essays that are more inquisitive and obsessive than self-centered, and they are pitched squarely at readers. They are almost, in the way they spring from and itemize the act of reading, meta-books.

Like any good magpie, Gabbert keeps the delightful facts coming, and often leads into them the way she might at a dinner party, with some version of: “I read somewhere that … .” In this vein, she notes that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is difficult to translate into Japanese because of “insect appreciation” — meaning, in short, that the Japanese might not find it all that gross or jarring to wake up as a giant bug. In a piece about the establishment of time in fiction, she writes about someone who studies caves and has lived in them for longish stretches to find out what his daily use of time would look like without any sunlight or conventional obligations to dictate it.

One essay here is titled “The Point of Tangency: On Digression,” and one way to describe this collection is as a series of tangents.

Which is not to say that Gabbert never builds a sustained argument or alights on a sturdy point. One essay starts as a series of thoughts about overwriting and excess. (“I’ve always enjoyed excess in art, up to and including Jeff Koons’ giant Mylar balloon dogs, as a kind of celebration, and magnification, of its central lack of necessity.”) But near the end, Gabbert transitions into an analysis of what she considers “the primary pitfall of memoir — an overeagerness to auto-analyze, and a false finality to the analysis.” In just three or four paragraphs, she brilliantly parses something you might have felt about dozens of memoirs without ever putting it quite this way.

The book’s modesty can occasionally feel like the result of rough cutting rather than design, surely due in part to the fact that these pieces have been gathered from their original sources; many were first published on The Smart Set, an online magazine. It’s a short book, and ideas and images recur — sometimes in a way that feels intentional and rewarding, but just as often in a way that feels unplanned and unnecessary. When Gabbert mentions for a second time that she fantasizes in the third person, one wonders if she knows she’s doing it. “Bedroom in Alcatraz,” about the diagram of a prison cell, first appeared in Territory, an online site about maps, and it feels out of place having been uprooted from its original context and planted in this book’s soil.

John Williams

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