Category: words

America’s (and Twitter’s) favorite dictionary defines dumpster fire as “an utterly calamitous or mismanaged situation or occurrence.” Abby Ohlheiser investigates the history of the term and its spread via (of course) social media and into the mainstream.

“Joan Silber took the fiction prize for her novel Improvement. … The nonfiction prize went to Frances FitzGerald for her book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, a sweeping history of the Evangelical movement from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election. Layli Long Soldier won the poetry prize for her acclaimed collection Whereas. The autobiography prize went to Xiaolu Guo for her book Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China. The prize in criticism went to Carina Chocano for her essay collection You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages. The prize in biography went to Caroline Fraser for her book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

Emily Wilson’s presence on Twitter is quietly revolutionary, a new kind of experience for readers, poets, translators, and really anyone who likes to watch knowledge take shape in an open format, its seams exposed. Like-minded people sharing their obsessions were the soil in which the larger Internet once grew; those transactions, commercialized and monetized, remade the world, with infinite ramifications downstream, some miraculous, some horrible. But the process of writing—what my kids, when they used to see me at my computer, called “choosing words”—has been mostly non-transactional, contained within the silos of individual imaginations or small communities, like M.F.A. workshops.

After the Second World War, alienation came to betoken a near-universal spiritual and psychological malaise. Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used it to describe a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Novelists such as Albert Camus, the author of The Stranger (1942), demonstrated its effects in the indifferent numbness of casual violence. By the time J D Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a chronicle of adolescent estrangement featuring the anti-hero Holden Caulfield, alienation was invoked to explain everything from juvenile delinquency and galloping divorce rates to voter apathy and substance abuse. The term was taken to define the fundamental pathology of modern life.

And – perhaps ironically! – the book is titled after a viral blog post from 2014 by author Reni Eddo-Lodge: “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.” The prize is for, in Britain’s terms, a BAME writer – Black, Asian, or minority ethnic. The judges said it was “a thunderclap of a book” and that it “unflinchingly confronts a country where racism is – by all indicators – at an all-time high, but there are no identifiable racists.”

Ask David Foster Wallace – or Leslie Jamison: “I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. But Infinite Jest knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.”

Sharmaine Lovegrove, the woman who opened the first English-language bookstore in Berlin when she couldn’t get any hold in London, returned to Britain 20 years later – only to be met with a depressing reality. “It felt like we had gone backwards. The publishing industry has utterly failed to tell the stories of people across society, having told talented, diverse writers for decades that there was no space for them, and expecting a largely white, predominantly middle-class staff to be pardoned for not ‘being woke enough’ because of their ‘privilege,’ which only now seems to embarrass them.” So, of course, she’s doing something about it.

Alix Ohlin is taking on at least the first task for a program that has been in disarray since the suspension and firing of its former chair, Stephen Galloway, under accusations of sexual harassment, in the fall of 2015 and early 2016. Ohlin, who was out of the country when this happened, says “I know it was an incredibly stressful time. … I think this program in particular is more than just the sum of these past few years. It does have a long tradition of fostering talent. It has great alumni, it has the ability to recover that and to rebuild and find itself again.”

Maeve Brennan “would not have left Ireland at the age of 17 if she’d been given the choice, and yet in her adult years she didn’t choose to return. A displaced person, always on provisional ground. When writing about New York City she described herself as a ‘traveler in residence.’ She was staying for a while, poised to depart. And in that displacement she may be a figure for the Irish American a little disoriented as to notions of home, or for any immigrant who finds herself elsewhere without having chosen to leave where she came from.”