In recollections of her friendship with Kathy Acker, Avital Ronell writes, “Derrida locates in surviving the origin and essence of friendship. Not empirically or chronologically clocked but fundamental, the structure of surviving means that one of you will be left behind, responsible and responsive to the intemporal, irretrievably mute other.”
In our morning reading: looking back at “The Age of Innocence” on film, interviews with Colette Shade and Steve Aylett, and more.
In our afternoon reading: reviews of novels by Deb Olin Unferth and Allie Rowbottom, a literary tour diary, and more.
We’re pleased to debut the cover art for Matthew Wong Foreman’s forthcoming novel Sunset at Lion Rock, set to be published by 7.13 Books on September 15, 2026. The novel, set in Hong Kong in the early 21st century, follows a young man experiencing a dramatic change in his beliefs about religion and politics. The author explained the significance of the cover:
In our morning reading: thoughts on “Assorted Crisis Events,” good reading on soccer, and more.
After You
by Alex Treuber
I was nineteen years old when I started following people. The first was a young man holding a bouquet of flowers with tears running down his cheeks. I followed him down to the docks and watched from afar as he ripped the heads from their stems and tossed them into the current where they floated away like paper sailboats. As he wailed into the gray wind I felt something inside me settle into place, an overwhelming sense of warmth and solace, and that night I dreamed I was walking down the aisle in a great white wedding gown made of roses.
In our weekend reading: an interview with Nora Lange, book recommendations from Maris Kreizman, and more.
Dostoyevsky had a roulette system. Fine-tuning his method in Baden-Baden, he wrote to his brother in 1863 confidently laying down the fundamentals of his infallible method, which, once you weed out the giddiness and guff, amounts to this: bet more, and if you lose, bet even more. Pile on more money, eventually you’ll hit a winning streak. Of course, as might’ve been expected, Dostoyevsky never retired on his roulette winnings, instead finding himself broke and forced to write his sketchy novella The Gambler in a few days to get out of debt. The Gambler is Dostoyevsky’s casino hangover, but the Russian giant’s ego being what it was, even so soon after his losing bouts at the tables in those European spa towns, he still glorified a little in the casino world that’d almost destroyed him.