WRB—June 3, 2026

“gibbering shrieks”

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not managing to edit the Washington Review of Books more.

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman interviews Jonathan Franzen:

  Treisman: Adele is quickly seduced by the “spirit of theatre.” Or is she seduced more by the fact that she has a talent for acting? That she’s found an area in which she stands out? Why do you think that change in her happens so quickly and with seemingly little resistance on her part?

  Franzen: People who become artists typically have both a great talent and an unquenchable thirst for attention, and theatre offers a stage for the former and the most direct possible relief for the latter. The audience is there in the flesh, shutting up and paying attention to your talent. But this liveness of performance is the essence of theatre, its “spirit,” and so the answer to your question may be: both her talent and the theatre. When a young person discovers a talent, the change often happens quickly. You’ve stepped onto a train, and it whisks you away with it. When I started writing, in high school, I don’t remember feeling any resistance at all to it (except from my worried parents). My feeling was: why do anything else when it feels so right to do this?

  [In conjunction with an excerpt from a novel in progress.

  I suppose fighting with Oprah is probably the best way for a novelist with an unquenchable thirst for attention to try slaking it. And it must be nice for writing to “feel so right”—the rest of us do it out of an uncurable compulsion. —Steve]

• In SOUVENIR Magazine, Henry Begler on the little magazines of modernism:

  In 1929, [Robert McAlmon] left for Mexico City, claiming that “what Paris had once offered was no longer there so far as I was concerned,” and continued to write and publish his novels and poems. He has often been described as one of the great might-have-beens of the Lost Generation, “the man with . . . all the right connections who never fulfilled his promise,” as a 1990 New York Times review of his novel Village put it. And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for denying him the acclaim that so many of his friends enjoyed. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle . . . preyed on by the vultures of the writing world.” Like the cowboys upon which he modeled his persona, he was a drifter, always moving, always after something he couldn’t quite reach. He claimed to want the literary success and status that his peers enjoyed, but one doubts that it would have made him happy. Those who did manage to form solid friendships with him remembered him fondly, and it is undoubtedly true that he was a key resource for the writers of the period. Perhaps there is something in the peripatetic nature of figures like him that inspires others, something in their eternal dissatisfaction that makes them a good friend to writers who might benefit from the eyes of a skeptical but supportive outsider. “It was a tremendous experience knowing him,” eulogized Glassco in a letter. “He was always so alive and refreshing. And I was very fond of him—even when he became intolerably insulting: somehow, one excused him everything . . . ”

  [Who wants to write about the WRB in a hundred years? (You can borrow “intolerably insulting,” if you must.) —Steve]

• In the TLS, Gabriel Rolfe on the time Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne got into it over grading exams:

  In retrospect, Hill’s efforts seem futile, especially when turning to the resulting examiners’ reports. There, Prynne takes aim not at the shortcomings of the students, but at their examiners. “Coming newly to the setting and marking for this paper,” he writes, “my most forcible impression was the extremely awkward challenge presented by the shape of the Paper as a whole.” Going on to acknowledge various failures of candidate response, moreover, he records his allegiance not to any “rubric,” but to the candidates themselves. “These are the reactions of those who feel themselves severely beleaguered,” Prynne laments, “and it is hard not in some measure to sympathize with their plight.”

  [Come for Cambridge arcana, stay for Rolfe pulling out a letter where Prynne invokes Hill as an example of “elevated pseudo alternatives . . . shot through with the crudest narcissism.”

  And Prynne’s recent death (R.I.P.) has let the Brits really show that they’re better than us at this whole literary culture thing. (We linked to some earlier discussion of Prynne in WRB—May 20, 2026.) —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I talk myself into opposing taking pictures on your phone

• Nigerian scammers and artistic inspiration

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and architecture

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]