- With two new novels out this week, Nell Zink has a claim for writing the most provocative series of opening sentences. Nicotine begins: ‘A thirteen-year-old girl stands in a landscape made almost entirely of garbage, screaming at a common domestic sow’. Private Novelist opens with: ‘It having become apparent that I should write a novel, my next concern became which novel I should write’. Neither quite matches 2015’s The Wallcreeper: ‘I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.’ Lithub
- Eileen Myles’s new poetry collection is titled I Must Be Living Twice. Fittingly, different versions of the poet seem to be popping up all over. Myles’ ex-partner Leopoldine Core’s short story, ‘Historic Tree Nurseries’, seems to be modelled on their relationship, while actress Cherry Jones plays Myles in the HBO series Transparent. Maria Dimitrova asks her how it feels to be performed · The White Review
- This week New York Review of Books journalist Claudio Gatti allegedly revealed the true identity of Elena Ferrante after investigating her publisher’s financial records. Many have critiqued his decision to ignore the author’s carefully considered choice to use a pseudonym. Gatti’s article (which we won’t link to here) feels more like a tabloid reveal than a considered piece of journalism. In 1996, journalist Nancy Jo Sales, embarked on a similar hounding of recluse Thomas Pynchon. Yet while she revealed the city he lived in, Sales acknowledged the value of anonymity – Pynchon is ‘everywhere and nowhere, really. And maybe that’s the way it should be’ · New York Magazine
- The American election has invaded every aspect of media this month. A personal favourite in fiction is Darcey Steinke’s ‘The Blue Toes’: terrified urbanites flee New York after ‘the Tomato’ wins the election and his followers invade the city · Catapult
- ‘A girl student goes into her professor’s office and sits at his desk and passes him a note which he opens and which reads: “Girls like to be spanked.”’ Harold Pinter’s ‘Girls’ is either an inappropriate and objectifying monologue by a lecherous old man, or a delicate investigation of what we can and can’t say · Granta
