Roxane Gay, the author of Bad Feminist and other books, has a new book club, which is airing on Vice News. “We’re going to drink some alcohol, we’re going to talk about books, and we’re going to get a little petty.” The first book she discusses—with Mira Jacob, Mike Eagle, and Debbie Millman—is Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys.
At Public Books, Dan Sinykin has published an essay about how capitalism has shaped American literature. “Fifty years ago,” he begins, “almost every publisher in the United States was independent.” Not so anymore. We are well into the “conglomerate era,” he says, and with that has come the “conglomerate novel.” He then uses new data science to build a model that distinguishes between two categories of books: the conglomerate novel and the nonprofit novel. “I built this model to investigate whether nonprofits are, as they claim, more literary than conglomerates. The results allow me to extend recent computational studies into literariness and answer yes.”
Kevin Killian, who died in June, was many things: poet, novelist, critic, playwright, memoirist, “pioneer of queer fiction.” He was central in bringing the work of the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer to the audience it deserved. Now, there’s a gofundme page that allows you to donate to help his partner, Dodie Bellamy, to help organize his estate, and also to secure him a memorial niche at Cypress Lawn, the California cemetery where Spicer is interred, which has become a treasured destination for poets.
At the Times Magazine, Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen, writes about whiteness, privilege, and what she learned by asking “a stranger directly about white privilege.”
At Jacobin, Joe Allen reports on a recent strike at an Amazon warehouse, and hopes that similar strikes will help employees fight the company’s notoriously bad working conditions.
New York: Tonight, Rob Sheffield, reads and discusses his excellent book Dreaming the Beatles with critic Jenn Pelly at the Granite Prospect of the Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The Times remembers Michael Seidenberg, “whose clandestine bookshop and literary salon on the Upper East Side was much loved by bibliophiles, literati and inveterate browsers.”