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Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

The Person Who Performs

From an interview with the poet Alice Notley conducted by Janique Vigier that was scheduled to appear on the Artforum website in December. Vigier pulled the piece from publication in…

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The Same Grave

From Telegram messages sent in January by Muhammad Sultan, who lives in Gaza, to his sister Enas Sultan, who lives in Norway. Translated from the Arabic by Dalia Taha. Enas,…

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The Absent Reader

From an essay that appeared in Spike Art Magazine in December. The thing I will say about being young is I hated it. I wasn’t anybody, I was broke, my…

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Atlas Shrugged

From a complaint filed in November in the Circuit Court of Cook County, in Illinois, against Volkswagen Group of America et al. On February 23, 2023, at or around approximately…

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Everything Extremely Alive

From Bitter Water Opera, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press. I walked down a thin path, spotting in the distance a tall stone wall, as instructed. My…

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Shuck and Awe

From statements made by Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, since 2017. Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it. Never stand between a…

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Village of Dolls

From Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, which will be published next month by Graywolf Press.   Some people say Tsukimi Ayano makes her life-sized dolls out of…

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Tell It Scant

From a previously unpublished letter in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which is out next month from Harvard University Press. to unknown, late january 1878 Dear friend. We recollect you,…

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Computer Bits

From AI-generated explanations of New Yorker cartoons created for a study published in July 2023 in Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The scene…

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Gimme Welter

From All Things Are Too Small, which will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. “All things / are too small,” begins a poem believed to be written by the thirteenth-century Dutch…

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Dressing Down

From a letter written by C. Andrew Doyle, the ninth Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Texas, to Will Shortz and Robyn Weintraub, constructors of New York Times crossword puzzles.…

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Up and Down Together

From letters written from and to Terry Lynn King, who has been an inmate on Tennessee’s death row since 1985. The correspondence was included in Death Row Welcomes You, by…

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Film Bête Noire

From My Cinema, which was published by Another Gaze Editions in January. Translated from the French by Daniella Shreir. No longer any use in the make-believe of socialist hope. In…

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Cross Purposes

From The Riddles of the Sphinx, which was published this month by HarperOne. I was sixteen years old when a family friend gave me a copy of Dora, the case…

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Department of Corrections

From the inaugural issue of The Insiders Zine, which was published in 2022 and posted to the Internet Archive in December 2023. There seems to be an ongoing debate as…

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Our Pierre

From Trondheim, which was published last month by Bellevue Literary Press. On the day their son was going to die, Lil had given herself the task of carrying forty-plus sacks…

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Words Fail Norman Mailer

From a September 2023 entry in Air Mail. My dad, Tom Wolfe, delighted in defending his style of writing and had no qualms about throwing barbs at other writers. In…

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A Soft Sonnet

From Sleep, which was republished by New York Review Books in November 2023. a soft sonnet is all the strength i have to create, full easy life have i ever…

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The Coming of Age

From I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, which was published this month by Penguin Press. For months I was preoccupied with the matter of my name.…

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Ban After Reading

From a list of reasons books should be removed from public schools, as updated in December by Bruce Friedman, who leads the Florida chapter of No Left Turn in Education.…

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Projection Racket

From an interview of Tim Meyers, a retired cinema worker, conducted by Sebastian Becerra for the first issue of the zine Cashiers du Cinéma in August 2023. sebastian becerra: When…

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Cookie Monster

From an interview included in RoboDoc, a documentary series released in August about the making of the 1987 film RoboCop, which starred Peter Weller as a cybernetically enhanced police officer.…

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Death and Saxes

From entries in The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, which will be published in April by New York Review Books. Another good day to think and be thankful for. There is…

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Rico-Terrorism

From Georgia’s August 2023 indictment of members of the grassroots movement Defend the Atlanta Forest, in which prosecutors charged more than sixty individuals under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations…

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Like Other People

From an account by Dr. Hammam Alloh that was told to Maya Rosen and published by Jewish Currents on October 30, 2023. Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike in…

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Harm Offensive

From leaflets distributed in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces between October 13 and November 16, 2023. As of this writing, the United Nations estimates that more than 60 percent…

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Love Hurts

From a fictional dialogue with his father in his novel Change, which will be published this month by Harvill Secker. Translated from the French by John Lambert. Before meeting Elena…

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Sesame Street Racing

From the original description of Need for Spirit Drink & Drive Simulator published in Nintendo’s online store in October. overview: Get ready to embark on a wild journey as a…

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April 2024

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