TOBI'S DESK

Anna Karina Anna Karina’s rehearsal for her first major scene with director Jean-Luc Godard ended early. The scene was for the film The Little Soldier (1960), in which the male lead photographs Karina’s character in her apartment, asking her questions and telling her to move around so he can get at her “truth.” Godard intervened and took the mock interrogation one step further, demanding to know when she had first had sex and how many men she’d slept with. She didn’t know whether the director was asking her or her character, and Karina’s face flashed from white rage to scarlet embarrassment. “ Ça ne vous regarde pas ,” she replied in hesitant French, It’s none of your business . The line is included in the final cut. This exchange between Karina and Godard launched one of the most important partnerships in the history of cinema. A year later, they married, and Paris Match called Karina “the newlywed of the New Wave.” She went on to star in six more of Godard’s feature films, bec...

Jack Youngerman (photo: Hans Namuth) Last week, my mother called to tell me, her voice wobbling, that the artist Jack Youngerman had died. He passed away on February 19, after a fall. He was ninety-three years old. I was ten years old the first time I visited Jack’s studio. My father brought me—perhaps to pick up a print he’d bought, or perhaps simply to say hello. I recall the feeling of the space, the cool cement floors, the wide skylights, the bright colors dancing off the canvas-lined walls. My family’s house sits approximately four hundred yards from Jack’s, at the end of a long dirt driveway in Bridgehampton, New York. As a kid, I passed his house and the adjacent studio—a small red barn nestled on the edge of a meadow—every day on my walk home from the school bus. Growing up, we had few neighbors and Jack was a friendly presence. Rosy-cheeked and white-haired, he would often drop by our house with his corgi, Winslow, trotting by his side. I would sometimes catch glimpses of...

Center, one of the few remaining images of Violo Roseboro’, in her 20s Viola Roseboro’ (apostrophe intentional), the larger-than-life fiction editor at McClure’s , haunted magazine offices from the 1890s to the Jazz Age. A reader, editor, and semiprofessional wit, she discovered or mentored O. Henry, Willa Cather, and Jack London, among many others. Today she is nearly completely forgotten. She could often be seen walking through downtown Manhattan alone, recognizable from her preoccupied step, thick dark hair, gray eyes under arching brows, and her purported resemblance to George Sand. She declined to wear corsets and loved cigarettes, and insisted on getting as much fresh air as possible. Instead of occupying a desk, she liked to pack manuscripts into a suitcase and take them to a bench in Madison Square Park, where in all seasons she could be found smoking, reading, and strategizing about how to develop a protégé. Roseboro’ forged an identity for herself as a tastemake...

The Nigerian writer Ukamaka Olisakwe is set to release a new novel. Titled Ogadinma, or Everything Will Be All Right, the book, already being praised as “a feminist classic,” will be published by The Indigo Press on 18 June 2020. Olisakwe joins the growing list of authors signed to the Ellah Wakatama Allfrey-founded publishing house. […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2wCbjIB

The 2020 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award has been awarded to the South African writer Resoketswe Manenzhe for her novel Scatterlings. Resoketswe will receive a R35,000 cash prize and book publication by Jacana Media. The title would be available in September 2020. Jennifer Malec, the South African editor and a judge for the Award, stated that […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2va5cej

Anna Kavan. Anna Kavan’s short story “Ice Storm” begins in winter, with the narrator leaving Grand Central Terminal to visit friends in Connecticut, to clear her head and make a decision (about what, is left unspecified). They can’t understand why she has chosen to leave her “nice warm Manhattan apartment” for the relentless chill of the country. A similar question: Why would we leave the warmth of a relatively comfortable life to enter fiction like Kavan’s, which is often fraught and frigid? Her masterful lucidity and dispassionate affectation—on display in Machines in the Head , a collection of Kavan’s short fiction, out this week from NYRB Classics—is a journey into the cold to clear your head. Unlike her most popular work, the excellent novel Ice , which skids along planes of disrupted reality, these stories (selected from the span of her writing life) are tighter and more focused. The psychological reality of her characters is rendered sharply: in the title story, the narrator ...

A PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH SPENCER FROM THE FILM LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART. When she died last December at the age of ninety-eight, the novelist Elizabeth Spencer was described as “a national treasure.” The author of nine novels, eight story collections, a memoir, and a play, she had mastered every mode of literary fiction. Her first novel appeared in 1948 and her most recent book in 2014. On the page, Spencer makes what’s technically difficult seem unusually clear, then psychologically inevitable. From the start, her voice was praised for its tonal nuance, its stratospheric empathy. Spencer had the gift for infusing social situations with a bullfight’s fatality. She was born in 1921 in the waning plantation culture of Carrollton, Mississippi. Senator John McCain was her second cousin. She grew up owning a horse and believing in ghosts. The subject of race was inescapable in the Jim Crow South and it figured strongly in her fiction. At her career’s very start, Elizabeth Spencer won the...

A new Nairobi-based print and online magazine, down river road, is exploring the margins, the shifting centers, and the new spaces through literature, music, and visual art. In an email to Brittle Paper, one of its editors Frankline Sunday described it as being interested in “alternative forms of creating and expression.” Its first print issue, […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2uhGE2x

Dr Stella Nyanzi is free. The academic, feminist and queer rights advocate has been in prison for criticising Uganda’s long-serving president Yoweri Museveni. She was found guilty of “cyber harassment” against President Museveni in August 2019 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Nyanzi, through her lawyers, appealed her conviction and sentence, citing unfairness and […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/37NC5KY

The Miles Morland Foundation African Writers’ Scholarship is currently accepting accepting applications for its 2020 program. It is an initiative of the Miles Morland Foundation, which also administers the prestigious and separate Morland Writing Scholarship. This Scholarship is awarded to a postgraduate student within the University of East Anglia’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2VghKM1

Our column  Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The French writer Inès Cagnati was not unknown during her lifetime, but she was deeply unwilling to play the public role that helps a writer secure a place in the canon, or to spread her fame beyond national borders. Her three novels, written over the course of the seventies, each won or was nominated for France’s most prestigious literary prizes, but the recent New York Review Books edition of Free Day ( Le jour de cong é , her 1973 debut) , is the first English translation. The irony of her embrace by the French literary establishment lies in Cagnati’s deep sense of alienation from the country in which she was born and raised. The daughter of Italian immigrant farmworkers, Cagnati grew up poor and isolated in the small town of Monclar, in southwestern France. She spoke no French until she went to school, and although she eventually became a teacher and a novelist in the language, ...

On Kawara, Moon Landing (detail), 1969, from the Today series (1966–2013), acrylic on canvas, three panels, each 61″ x 89″. Installation view, Glenstone Museum. © One Million Years Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy Glenstone Museum. Not long ago, I volunteered to take part in a performance at the contemporary art museum near my home. Very little is known about the artist who created the piece. Even in a recent obituary, his date of death and the names of survivors were deliberately withheld, “in keeping with his lifelong penchant for privacy.” In death, as in life and art, his biography has remained publicly minimalist. We do know that he was born on December 24, 1932, in Kariya, Japan. And so he would have been roughly four months from his thirteenth birthday when nuclear bombs were dropped on his country. In his late twenties, he moved to Mexico City with his father, the director of an engineering company, where he continued to study art, eventually moving to Paris, then ...

“I was 16 years old, nearly 17, when a boy first expressed interest in me. Or, maybe it was that I was 16, nearly 17, when I first took notice of a boy’s interest in me.” This is how Chinelo Okparanta’s recollection of her first teenage crush begins. In a piece for Freeman’s magazine, republished […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2SHBHt8

Finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. The Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste is nominated in the Fiction category for her second novel The Shadow King, which is set during the second Italo-Ethiopian war and centers on women who fought in it. The Zambian novelist Namwali Serpell is nominated in the Ray […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2T3tC0U

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column,  Happily , focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Joseph Martin Kronheim illustration for Tom Thumb, circa 1850s Noah, my eight-year-old son, and I go to Target. He is carrying a little stuffed monkey, and as we walk through the automatic doors he puts it under his shirt. “No, no,” I say. “Bondo is shy,” he says. “I told him I’d keep him safe.” “No, no,” I say. Under Noah’s shirt, Bondo could be anything. He could be wild and alive. He could be something that doesn’t belong to him. He could be a bouquet of flowers or a gun or a book of fairy tales about the bodies of black boys. “Why?” he asks. “Why,” I answer, or I start saying something and then stop, or I say “because it isn’t safe,” or I say “I love you,” or I say “here, let me hold him.” A few days later, a friend posts on Facebook that her nine-year-old black son is now riding his bike to the supermarket by himself. “We have talked to him,” she writes, “about using a bag for the items ...