- ‘Reverse-engineered headlines, buzzy premises fleshed out with the gritty details of first-hand experience’ – the personal essay puts harrowing stories of personal hardship in the public arena. ‘Writers feel like the best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them,’ explains ex-Jezebel editor Jia Tolentino, prompting Slate to wonder whether the editors who publish these essays take advantage of the people (mostly women) who they claim to empower. Elsewhere, Tolentino examines the personal essay’s reign of trauma, tracking its growth via the internet’s clickbait culture and transgressive aesthetics.
- Revelations over Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long campaign of sexual harassment and exploitation has opened up an energetic international discussion about industry-sanctioned sex abuse: ‘Consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it,’ Brit Marling writes. ‘Today’s monster is yesterday’s “character”,’ warns Lucy Prebble, hinting at Weinstein equivalents in the British theatre industry. ‘I wanted to know what it does to the artist’s mind to have to navigate that type of landscape while at the same time trying to be good at art,’ explains Claire Vaye Watkins on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast.
- In her 2016 book, Anger and Forgiveness, philosopher of feeling Martha Nussbaum explains that anger is a response to being harmed, and involves a wish to do harm to the wrongdoer in return. Though she claims to rarely experience anger now, in a profile for the New Yorker, Nussbaum alludes to her long struggle excising the emotion – as a child she prayed to be relieved of her fury, ‘fearing its potential was infinite’ and that she would kill somebody.
- ‘What to do when one knows they know they’re culpable’ – Rickey Laurentiis and Solmaz Sharif discuss self-awareness in poetry for SUBLEVEL magazine. Their frank, intimate discussion involves itself in the dilemmas of public and private expression, and asks what poetry might have to do with duty. We published Sharif’s poem ‘Force Visibility’ in Granta 134: No Man’s Land.
- Halloween happened this week. We marked the occasion with some brand new horror stories. From Jack Underwood a tale of unusual happenings at a creepy British funeral parlour; Claire Luchette sends a group of young nuns to rural Montana to stay with a man with no jaw; and a group of children search for their decapitated mother in Gonçalo M. Tavares’s ‘The Headless Woman’. All three are pretty great, and worth reading whether or not the dead are currently walking the earth.
