A professor emails her old MFA students in South Carolina to tell them how intellectually superior the new ones at Columbia are. I dunno. Columbia has graduated many outstanding writers but also, one professor contends, some demonstrably terrible ones.
Yes! Wire creator David Simon has, alongside Annette Gordon-Reed, David Cromer, and Yiyun Li, been awarded a MacArthur (genius) grant. My pal Balk and I duel at sundown.
Lorin Stein’s first issue of The Paris Review is, like the books he’s edited and the magazine’s new beautifully redesigned website, elegant, edgy, and surprising, an unusual but cohesive mix of writing characterized by intelligence and precision and, frequently, humor. As Stein observes in his Editor’s Note, by the time The Paris Review was founded in 1953, critics had already . . .
Mary Gaitskill wrote her first published story at 22. Now it seems so misanthropic to her that “I almost want to apologize to the universe.”
Vivian Gornick says the difficult marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy “is something that Dostoevsky more easily than Tolstoy might have written.” (Via.)