The winners of this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, which honor excellence in LGBT literature, include Eileen Myles and Hilton Als. At the June 6th ceremony, winners in twenty-five categories will be announced by a stellar cast of writers, performers, and activists including actor Cherry Jones (who played a Myles-like character on Transparent), editor Tavi Gevinson, comedienne Kate Clinton, and many other stars.
The New York Timesaccompanied Bret Easton Ellis on a night out to see the Broadway musical version of his novel American Psycho. After some initial trepidation, Ellis appeared to enjoy the show, as the paper describes: “Pretty soon, Mr. Ellis was reveling in the punch lines, most of them lifted straight out of the book, and silently congratulating himself, thinking, ‘That’s mine, that’s mine,’ he said later.” Still, Ellis doesn’t want to seem too gratified that his controversial novel—with its laugh lines at Trump’s expense—has found unexpected resonance twenty-five years after it was first published: “Vindicated is too strong a word, because that would mean that I care too much. . . I would say, I’m mildly surprised.”
At Page Turner, Joshua Rothman considers the fifth and penultimate volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (out this week), using its publication as an opportunity to look back on the project. Rothman notes that one of Knausgaard’s preoccupations across the series has been “auditioning routes to freedom” that never really pan out, including music, drinking, and sex. In the fifth volume, we see Knausgaard finally finding something that frees him from his abiding sense of being trapped—a selfless way of writing that explores what the novelist has called the space between reality and ideas. This is what’s so mesmerizing about the novel, Rothman writes, arguing that the author doesn’t quite fit the “solipsistic” label that’s so often applied to him: “Knausgaard writes beautifully about landscapes, and he describes his inner life the way he describes a landscape, simply noting, with tender exactness, what is there. . . . The inner and outer landscapes are united. He’s invented a new kind of narration: he chronicles the minute details of his own existence, but not from the perspective of himself.”
The pathologically modest critic Michael Dirda bemoans the plainness of his own prose style: “I have no flair for similes and metaphors,” he writes. “Nothing ever reminds me of anything else.” Dirda revels in some of the discoveries to be made in Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor, from the simple but devastating (from the novelist Ouida: “Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well say that a house should resist an earthquake”) to the bizarre and unforgettable: “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once compared human existence to an unlikely vegetable: ‘I wax impatient sometimes to think of how much time it takes to do a little fragment of what one would like to do and dreams of. Life is like an artichoke; each day, week, month, year, gives you one little bit which you nibble off — but precious little compared to what you throw away.’”
From Duke University Press comes a definitive new series of the writings of Stuart Hall, a founding member of the British New Left and one of the twentieth century’s greatest cultural theorists. Alongside edited volumes on themes from race to popular culture to photography, the series will include the first US edition of Hall’s memoir, Displacements: Lives and Ideas in Two Black Diasporas, due out next year. The first volume in the series will be published this October, but in the meanwhile, you may want to watch John Akomfrah’s moving tribute to Hall, which is full of fascinating archival footage.
Tonight at McNally Jackson, Dan Fox, Asad Raza, and Christian Lorentzen will celebrate pretentiousness, in honor of Fox’s new book on the subject. Pretentiousness is, Lorentzen says in his review, “something I crave, in myself and others. Authenticity is overrated — give me a perfectly struck pose.”