Elaine Castillo. Photo © Elaine Castillo.  The New York Times reports on the testimony of Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh, who took the stand yesterday in the trial that will determine whether the publisher will be allowed to acquire Simon Schuster.  At the New Yorker, read an excerpt from staff writer Hua Hsu’s new memoir Stay True, which will be published next month. In the excerpt, Hsu recalls faxing his father, who was working in Taiwan as Hsu was attending high school in California. Hsu writes that, at times, “We were like two strangers trading small talk at

Amitava Kumar In the Indian Express, novelist and essayist Amitava Kumar writes an open letter to Hadi Matar, the man who has been arrested for stabbing Salman Rushdie: “Listen, you are young and I understand you will only be sitting in a room doing nothing for many, many years. I hope you will find time to read this letter. The world learned last week that you are 24. The man you tried to kill is 75. I don’t know about you but when I was 24, I was reading that man’s writings with great devotion. You might even say

Salman Rushdie. Photo: Syrie Moskowitz Author Salman Rushdie was attacked this morning in western New York, where he was about to give a lecture, the Associated Press reports. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is banned in Iran, and the country’s late leader issued a fatwa calling for his death in 1989. AP’s Joshua Goodman writes that “​​Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.” Online at n+1, Jenny Brown, the author of Birth Strike,

Matthew Salesses The Paris Review Daily is bringing back their “Culture Diary” column. Today, the site posted a dispatch from Los Angeles by Maya Binyam. Of Elif Batuman’s new novel, Binyam writes, “Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man ‘saying “Uh, uh” in the background.’” For The Guardian, Janina Ramirez lists ten books about

Isaac Fitzgerald. Photo: Remi Morawski At the Paris Review, read Annalena Benini’s interview with the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, who died in June. They discuss Cavalli’s friendship with Elsa Morante, her affinity for domestic objects, and Cavalli’s first poems, which she wrote after seeing Kim Novak in the 1955 film Picnic: “I fell in love, went home, fasted for a week in protest because I’d never be able to know Kim Novak—and after the fast I wrote two poems. I found them recently while going through some old notebooks. One is titled ‘If Kim Novak were to die.’”  Katy

Sheila Heti (photo: Margaux Williamson) Hulu has optioned Sheila Heti’s forthcoming novel, Alphabetical Diaries. For the novel, Heti took a decade’s worth of diaries, placed each sentence in alphabetical order (based on the first word of the sentence), and then cut until a narrative took shape. The book will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023. Hulu hopes to turn the novel into a TV series.  The New York Times profiles poet Carmen Giménez, who starts her role as the publisher and executive director of Graywolf Press today. Giménez remembers looking at poetry chapbooks and zines at

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton At the New Yorker, Joy Williams looks at the photographs of Curran Hatleberg, which were taken mostly in northern Florida: “The atmosphere is weary, post-consumerish. No one seems to possess anything. The men and boys are often shirtless, the cars cannibalized. There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey.” Post45 Contemporaries has collected a series of appreciations for historian and activist Mike Davis’s work, with contributions by Madeline Lane-McKinley, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Eric Avila, and Megan Tusler.

Lynne Tillman, New York City, 2013. Writer and editor John H. Maher has been live tweeting the antitrust trial that will determine whether Penguin Random House will be allowed to acquire Simon Schuster. Today was day four of a trial that two days ago featured Stephen King testifying for the government’s case. The Los Angeles Times rounds up what you need to know about the proposed merger.   In her New York Times “By the Book” interview, Lynne Tillman discusses Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies (1943), noting “it was her only novel, and for that she’s not taught. Her stories

Mohsin Hamid. Photo: © Jillian Edelstein Pulitzer Prize–winning author Heather Ann Thompson is in the midst of a lawsuit to keep New York prisons from banning her book on the 1971 Attica prison revolt. The state attorney general’s office has proposed dismissing the suit, as prison officials have decided to lift the ban under the condition that two pages of Blood in the Water, which display a map of the prison, will be excised before reaching incarcerated readers. Thompson has noted that censorship at Attica by correctional officers was one of the factors that sparked the 1971 uprising.   Stephen

Michelle Tea. Photo: Gretchen Sayers At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, which was just published by Dey Street Books. Tea writes, “Although my friends’ anti-baby fears gave me the opportunity to try out my pro-baby arguments, the truth was, the dare to depart in this wild new direction existed inside my body alongside self-doubt, the economic scarcity issues that were my birthright, and basic terror of the unknown.”  At The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen considers the late Japanese sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki, whose stories appear for the first time in

Nuar Alsadir. Photo: Deborah Copaken Kogan Thomas Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Christian publishing, is releasing a new memoir by US Senator Tim Scott, America, a Redemption Story, on August 9. The copyright page states that the South Carolina Republican is preparing a presidential bid for the 2024 election. The publisher is now saying that Scott did not sign off on this declaration, and that printing it was a mistake. “The description on the copyright page was our error and is not accurate. It was not done at the direction or approval of the Senator or his team.

Gilbert Cruz. Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Gilbert Cruz, the Culture editor of the New York Times, will be the paper’s next Books editor, succeeding Pamela Paul. In a press release, the Times announced that Cruz will work to “reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age.”  Art in America’s second annual Summer Reading issue is out now, with Jackson Arn on artist biographies, Hannah Stamler on children’s books by artists, Lucy Ives on indie presses and self-publishing projects, and more.  Lincoln Michel has started a Twitter thread

Hannah Zeavin The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2022 grants. The winners include Hannah Zeavin, Christian Lorentzen, Damion Searls, Stephen F. Kearse, and Urmila Seshagiri, among others. For the Verso Books blog, Francesca Peacock writes about the politics of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: “Given Ginzburg’s life-long saturation in left-wing politics, why is it now so easy to read her fiction entirely divorced from this context? Part of the reason lies with Ginzburg herself: in her writing, she was unfailingly self-deprecating about her own political knowledge.” For more on Ginzburg, see Emily LaBarge’s 2017 review

Tiya Miles. Photo: © Kimberly P. Mitchell – USA TODAY NETWORK/Penguin Random House Yale has announced the finalists of this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding books “on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition.” The finalists are Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried, Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk.  For the New Republic, Scott Bradfield writes about Frank O’Hara’s circle and the joyous nonchalance of his poetry, and considers Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet. Calhoun’s new book is part biography and part memoir,

Mike Davis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons The Booker Prize longlist of thirteen writers has been announced. The shortlist will be released on September 6, with the final award given on October 17. Barack Obama has tweeted his summer reading list. The former president has been reading Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Ezra Klein, Hanif Abdurraqib, and more.   At the Los Angeles Times, Sam Dean interviews historian and activist Mike Davis about his life and career. Davis, the author of more than a dozen books, has terminal esophageal cancer. He told Dean, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I

Chloé Cooper Jones. Photo: Andrew-Grossardt The US Department of Justice is going to court in an attempt to block Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire its rival publisher Simon Schuster, calling the consolidation a violation of antitrust laws. Oral arguments will begin on August 1. Penguin Random House has purchased Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, which will be published by the Crown imprint on November 15. According to the publisher, the book, which will have a first printing of 2.75 million copies, is “a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge,

Jon Raymond. Photo: © Michael Palmieri For the New Yorker, Molly Fischer revisits Susan Faludi’s 1991 feminist text Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Fischer writes, “In the early nineties, Faludi situated the backlash within an ongoing cycle of feminist boom and bust in American history: periods of reactionary hostility toward feminism followed periods of widespread embrace.”   In her The Present Age newsletter, Parker Molloy looks at Issac Chotiner’s New Yorker interview with Alan Dershowitz. Molloy admires how Chotiner fact-checks some of the Dershowitz’s claims in the text itself. She observes that this is surprisingly rare: “For

N. Scott Momaday The New York Times profiles Hell Gate, a New York City news site that is owned by the journalists who work there. Founded in 2021 by veterans of publications like Gothamist, the Village Voice, and Jezebel, Hell Gate is dedicated to “that thing every New Yorker has passed walking down the street, that fleeting, only-in-New-York moment that everyone wonders about but doesn’t understand.”   Dana Canedy, a senior vice president and publisher at Simon Schuster is leaving the company. Canedy will be working on a sequel to her memoir, A Journal for Jordan, which SS is planning

Jamil Jan Kochai. Photo: Jalil Kochai. On NPR’s All Things Considered, Jamil Jan Kochai discusses his new story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and other Stories.  For Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Maniraho talks to five reporters about covering life online. Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter about web culture, tells Maniraho, “Of the tech-culture reporters I’ve spoken to over the last couple of years, we’ve all said that every story feels like this Russian nesting doll of weird specializations.” The HarperCollins Union went on strike today. Lindsay Zoladz has announced that she’s sold her first book,

Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Ilene Squires.  At the New York Times, a roundup of eighty-eight books to read this summer, including picks in sports, music, travel, romance, cooking, and more.   For Harper’s Magazine, Christian Lorentzen revisits the work of Christopher Hitchens as a new collection of his writing for the London Review of Books has just been published. Lorentzen observes that Hitchens’s “reputation is now weighted toward the work of his last decade—the turn right, the God bashing, and the public succumbing to cancer. It was during this era that he became a celebrity.” But, he writes, A Hitch