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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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ON A VERY chilly Los Angeles evening (I could see my breath and wore a scarf!) I heard Natasha Stagg read from her latest book, Artless: Stories 2019–2023 ( Semiotext(e), 2023), alongside Jackie Wang and Chris Kraus at the Poetic Research Bureau in the Historic Filipinotown neighborhood. The literary trio drew a packed crowd of friends-of-friends, Semiotext(e) enthusiasts, art and lit-world It Girls, and me. Stagg’s controlled eloquence sustained both her reading and the group conversation, just like the moments in her book where she states something seemingly simple that results in a moment of profound resonance. Artless collects stories from 2019 to 2023 focused on—put extremely generally—the art world and contemporary culture, and confesses to its gaps in knowledge: “I kind of know how that feels, but I don’t know exactly how it feels,” which is, perhaps, a statement all writers should make. By admitting her unreliability as a narrator, Stagg makes me trust her more and more. Her book collects musings, commissioned essays, autofiction, and professional dispatches, offering less of a holy fix and more of an anthropological study. But as Stagg states, “I’m listing grievances but not solutions. Why, I ask, should I know the answers?” ¤ SARAH YANNI: Before we get into elaborate questions about your new book, I want to acknowledge the new year. What are your ins and outs for 2024? NATASHA STAGG: Oh, I haven’t thought of them! I usually really like these lists. I don’t know … I think, I’ve been really not into fashion. For the past few years, I’ve been getting rid of everything and just being like, “This is so fashion victim that I own this.” And just in the last month, I’ve actually been buying stuff again. I feel like I had to purge and now I’m starting to be like, “Okay, I actually like fashion and I do want to buy pretty clothes.” So, in: fashion. Out: fashion. Yeah, in: buying new clothes. Out: all my old clothes. Okay, we love that. Shifting to your new book Artless —in the story “Difficult,” I was really interested […]
Click here to view original page at I Have to Poke Holes in Things: A Conversation with Natasha Stagg
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
