I’ve never before seen Walker Percy speak and am posting this clip, in which he analyzes the diminishing publication prospects for young writers, in case you haven’t either. For some reason his pronounced southern-aristocratic accent surprised me. I’m also in the midst of watching a longer video in which the author accepts a medal from Notre Dame although he says . . .
“I was fifteen when my best friend John shot his father in the face.” Christian Wiman, author of this sentence, talks with Jessa Crispin.
“Beckett’s style took time to develop — a lifetime, in fact — but his early letters offer fascinating glimpses of its first stirrings.”
When I and some friends reconnected with our senior-year high school English teacher at Facebook recently, he posted our syllabus, which was amazing to encounter after all this time. The class was my first exposure to Borges, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Heller, Kafka, and many other writers I still admire. Near the start of the year, we read “Noon Wine,” the story . . .
For the duration of its The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia show, the Guggenheim has given over its rotunda to Ann Hamilton’s “human carriage.” When set in motion, a simple and strangely beautiful little silk-canopied trolley circles the balustrade spirals, top to bottom, carrying Tibetan hand cymbals that ring at seemingly random intervals. Everyone not wearing headphones slowly becomes . . .