In my mind, I’m the one in the Western who takes a bullet in the arm and then gets back up on his horse and rides into the desert to hunt down the guy who shot him. And who knows? Hot-tempered and vindictive as I can be, if somebody pissed me off enough, it could happen. Where more commonplace pain . . .
Laila Lalami’s brilliantly cutting “The Missionary Position” — a look at the condition of Muslim women and the reactionary female activists that the West has chosen to exalt — appears in The Nation at last. (I read an early draft a couple months ago, and since then I’ve been making like a kid on a long car trip, emailing Lalami . . .
John Freeman remembers his affection, as a new college graduate living far from his girlfriend, for James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. “I fell into the novel as if it were a manhole someone hadn’t covered over,” Freeman says. So deep was his identification that, when he reads commentary on the book now, he worries “that I somehow straighted a gay novel . . .
Nobel laureate José Saramago discusses his politics with Stephanie Merritt. [T]he image of the venerable novelist shut away in his island retreat, disengaged from the world, could not be further from the truth. Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak . . .
The newly revised Portable Dorothy Parker includes about 600 pages of Parker’s essays, poetry, reviews, stories, and letters. Editor Marion Meade also reproduces the 1956 Paris Review interview in which Parker dismisses all her poetry in a single answer. (“My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody else, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in . . .