Ryan McIlvain at the LA Review of Books:
NEAR THE END of Samantha Allen’s new novel Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet, a memoirist who’s been moonlighting as a ghostwriter confides that he isn’t really an artist anymore, or anyway not the kind who’ll likely win a National Book Award. “I’m never going to be one of those waiflike, purple prose–writing authors who gets cover blurbs like ‘delicate and masterful’ or ‘a powerful meditation on X, Y, and Z.’”
It’s hard to tell if Adam Gallagher is being falsely modest here, not least because the book’s fade-out doesn’t let us in on the success or failure of future books under his name. We do get to read excerpts from the ghosted book Adam has been quickly but passionately at work on—an autobiography of a famous Hollywood action star named Roland Rogers, who happens to be dead at the time the work is commissioned, contracted, interviewed for, drafted, revised, and published. Rogers’s book is called The Truth, and his main aim in it is to come out of the closet at last. And, on the evidence of the few pages presented to us in a playful, moving coda, I’d say Adam the ghostwriter/editor has got moves, plenty of them.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
W
LUMS is proud and thrilled to acquire the Lutfullah Khan Sound Archive, the premier repository for the literary, cultural, musical, and intellectual heritage of Pakistan and the wider region. There is no other audio library in the region that comes close to matching the scale, richness, and uniqueness of this incredible collection that is bound to serve as an invaluable resource for interdisciplinary scholarship, student learning, and community outreach across various disciplines, including history, sociology, religion, cultural studies, musicology, film studies, and more.
David Edmonds’ Parfit belongs to a burgeoning genre. There are the two recent collective biographies of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch (by Benjamin Lipscomb and by Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). There are M.W. Rowe’s J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer and Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure. Earlier works include Ray Monk’s Russell and Wittgenstein volumes, Tom Regan’s Bloomsbury’s Prophet, and Bart Schultz’s books on Sidgwick and the other classical utilitarians. And Edmonds himself is inter alia the author of The Murder of Professor Schlick and the coauthor of Wittgenstein’s Poker.
Yascha Mounk: I’ve been trying to think through the state of economic policy at the moment, and it seems to me that we’re in a strange moment where there was a clear paradigm that economists followed in the ‘90s and perhaps the early 2000s, and that ran aground. Then there was a principled alternative to it that parts of the left tried to put forward, but that seems to have run aground as well.
In the room devoted to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender painting depicts a young woman with waifish features, blond tresses, and enormous slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Girl in Bed,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s subjects—the slender fingers and crumpled duvet, the high blush on the cheeks. The girl in question is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would soon become the artist’s wife. Freud made ten-odd paintings of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the sensitive, alluring “Girl Reading” and “Girl in Bed” (both produced in 1952, at the height of their courtship), to the abject “Hotel Bedroom,” from 1954, in which Blackwood appears wizened and withdrawn, while Freud himself stands by the window, lost in shadow.
I
In seventeenth-century England, people often commented after a meal: “We ourselves have had ourselves upon our trenchers”. This is an early version of today’s well-worn aphorism, ‘
Man-Devil is an entertaining exploration of Mandeville’s ideas, which he set out in The Fable of the Bees and other works. Callanan does not pretend that it is a full-scale biography of Mandeville. Indeed his life story, as far as we know it, could be told in a couple of pages. From a relatively prosperous Rotterdam family, educated in medicine at Leiden University, Mandeville was forced into exile in 1693 as a result of the family’s involvement in the Costerman riots, a protest against the activities of tax farmers, private citizens who collected revenue for the government in return for a large cut. He spent the rest of his life in London, working as a kind of psychiatrist with a particular interest in hypochondria. He died there in 1733.
The very first gay bar I regularly attended in San Francisco was this little hole-in-the-wall called Aunt Charlie’s. In 2003 (the literal second I turned 21), I began to attend their Thursday night party (a party that went on for 20 years, mind you). It was all post-disco freestyle, Hi-NRG, urban—the span of music was from about 1978 to 1982. To paint a picture, the songs would be shit like Gwen McCrae’s “Keep the Fire Burning,” Carol Hahn’s “Do Your Best,” Erotic Drum Band’s “Touch Me Where It’s Hot”—you get the idea. One day, the resident DJ pulled out the 1983 single of Madonna’s “Everybody,” with the iconic collage cover done by Lou Beach. At the time I was in an electroclash band—electroclash being an era of 2000s music that imitated the ’80s. I danced to this Madonna song that I had heard all through my childhood. Now I was an adult, drinking in bars, wondering how a song from 30 years ago felt more like “the future” than anything my friends and I were currently doing. This here is the magic of Madonna. All classics defy time. Every time “Everybody” is played, I come alive on the dance floor.
As reported credulously and breathlessly by just about every major media outlet, there are strange lights in the night sky all over the East Coast; particularly, it seems, in areas 
A novelist’s name is writ in water, and come a drought may be reduced to a wisp of spume. In his day Anthony Burgess was a very big fish in the literary pond, most famous, or infamous, for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, written in a wonderfully clever Russo-English patois of the author’s invention. The book was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, who later suppressed the film because of its perceived infatuation with or even encouragement to extreme violence.