LaToya Watkins (photo: Chanel Mitchell) Texas Monthly has published a package of articles that offer “ten reasons to believe we’re living in the golden age of Texas fiction.” Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, suggests that a “new wave” of writers is confronting the Lone Star State’s bloody history and “Anglo triumphalism.” Other articles highlight the state’s deeply gothic settings, Gabino Iglesias’s new horror novel The Devil Takes You Home, and the fiction of LaToya Watkins, whose debut novel, Perish, will be released next month.  Civitella Renieri has announced its new writing fellows, who include Hua

Fernando Pessoa Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel has posted a video of a recent event at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn: a conversation between Paisley Currah and Andrea Long Chu on Currah’s new book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity.  At Vulture, a roundup of the best books of 2022 so far. Some of the picks include Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour,  Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, and Olga Ravn’s The Employees.  Roger Hodge has been named the acting editor-in-chief for The Intercept. Betsy Reed, the former EIC, left to become the editor of the Guardian US.   At The Nation,

Paula Fox. Photo: HarperCollins UK  For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Sigrid Nunez writes about Paula Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters. It begins with Sophie Bentwood being bitten by a stray—and possibly rabid—cat; readers are “kept in suspense,” Nunez writes, as to “why Sophie, an intelligent and educated woman, would rather deny the problem, even as her hand swells and throbs, than seek medical advice.” After reading the novel in 1991, Nunez recommended it to Jonathan Franzen, who helped bring about the 1999 reissue. Fox, who also published over twenty books for children, reflected on her newfound

Akhil Sharma. Photo: Jack Llewellyn For the New York Times, Wyatt Mason writes about Akhil Sharma, who rewrote his first novel, An Obedient Father, more than twenty years after it was published.  The Wired union, which represents the staff at the technology magazine, has won its first contract after planning a strike.  The Getty has opened The Black History Culture Collection, a free resource of thirty thousand images from the Black diaspora in the US and UK.  For The Nation, Lily Meyer writes about the late Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and the challenge of translating her unadorned, unsentimental work.

Ada Limón. Photo: Lucas Marquardt Ada Limón, the author most recently of the collection The Hurting Kind, has been named the twenty-fourth US poet laureate. “Poetry is a way back in, to recognizing that we are feeling human beings,” Limón told the New York Times. “And feeling grief and feeling trauma can actually allow us to feel joy again.” At The Nation, Kevin Lozano writes about the decline of American glossy magazines in a review of former Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown’s memoir Dilettante: “While Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, and the like still carry some cachet, they are no

Hrishikesh Hirway In August, musician Hrishikesh Hirway, creator of the Song Exploder podcast, will launch a new miniseries titled Book Exploder, on which “authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write.” The lineup so far includes Susan Orlean, Min Jin Lee, George Saunders, Carman Maria Machado, Celeste Ng, and Tayari Jones. Random House has purchased Ana Marie Cox’s memoir Just Like Your Mother, in which the author, who writes the “Sober Questioning” column for The Cut, dwells on her alcoholism, her recovery, and her difficult relationship with her mother, also an alcoholic; Random

Elvia Wilk. Photo: Nina Subin/Soft Skull Press The latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review, titled “The Everything Virus,” is anchored by Jon Allsop’s media reporting and takes stock of how the COVID-19 pandemic has been covered over the last two and a half years.  n+1 has published an excerpt from Elvia Wilk’s forthcoming essay collection, Death by Landscape, in which she reflects on writing, rewriting, and even reenacting her debut novel, Oval: “Even for those writers who have every paragraph outlined before they begin (not me), there remains a tiny element of the unknown when you set the simulation

Carmen Giménez. Photo: Jason Gardner Photography Carmen Giménez has been announced as the new executive director and publisher of Graywolf Press, succeeding Fiona McCrae. Giménez is the founder of the literary nonprofit Noemi Press and the author of the poetry collection Be Recorder, which Graywolf published in 2019. She will begin her new role on August 8.  For the Paris Review, Elisa Gabbert writes about fame, obscurity, and the appeal of “Why I Write” essays: “Some days I think the very question is banal, like photos of a writer’s ‘workspace.’ They’re all just desks! Why write? Why do anything?

Randall Kenan At Lit Hub, Tarell Alvin McCraney introduces a new edition of Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits, out now from Grove Press. McCraney writes that Kenan “gives us back our wonder. True graceful wonder.”  Brandon Taylor is joining Unnamed Press as an acquiring editor. You can read Taylor’s essays on literature and culture at his newsletter Sweater Weather.  For the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant writes about Pamela Paul’s New York Times op-ed “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” Paul—an opinion editor at the Times who used to be

Cristina Rivera Garza. Photo: And Other Stories For the New Yorker, Merve Emre considers Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza’s body of work. In Rivera Garza’s new story collection, out now from Dorothy, the dearth of proper names is generative: “The substitution of a descriptive epithet for a proper name is Rivera Garza’s signature technique for creating character. It is a baptismal act that reveals the lie behind all description. There is nothing natural or essential about the words—‘man,’ ‘woman’—that categorize people.” Rivera Garza’s writing is rife with other revealing gaps and elisions; discussing the absence of the word “femicide”

Namwali Serpell. Photo: © Peg Skorpinski BOMB magazine has put together a selection of pieces from their archives to celebrate Pride month, with contributions from Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, and Brontez Purnell, interviews with Audre Lorde, Hilton Als, and Féliz Gonzáles-Torres, reflections on the Orlando nightclub shooting, art and the body, and much more.  At the New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell considers “the figure of the Whore” in art and literature, from Emile Zola’s Nana to Janicza Bravo’s 2020 film Zola. “Wherever she appears,” Serpell writes, “she’s pressed into service as a rhetorical or symbolic conceit. It

The Death Panel podcast has unlocked its episode about the end of Roe v. Wade, featuring a conversation with the hosts and Melissa Gira Grant, Charlotte Shane, and Abby Cartus.

Lauren Michele Jackson. Northwestern University At Gawker, Tarpley Hitt writes about the decision by New York magazine and Elizabeth Weil to anonymize her cover feature “Canceled at 17” and not to disclose that one of Weil’s children attended the school the story is about. Hitt argues that the latter choice distorted the story; had Weil’s connection to the school been revealed, “It would have also revealed the piece for what it was: a personal, and by extension, particular, story—not, as it purported to be, a sweeping parable of the times. That tension presents an inherent flaw in the assignment.

Mike Davis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons On social media, tributes are pouring in for activist, scholar, and historian Mike Davis, who is terminally ill. Davis, the author of more than a dozen books, was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. In 2021, Micah Uetricht wrote for The Nation that “Over the course of a remarkable career, [Davis] has been resolutely clear-eyed about the nightmares we face as a society and a planet, mostly bearish on the prospects for reversing those nightmares, and always prescient.” For Bookforum, Sasha Frere-Jones reviewed Davis’s latest book (cowritten with Jon

Fiona McCrae Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae is retiring after twenty-eight years at the helm of the venerable independent press. Ethan Nosowsky, an editor at Graywolf, writes: “There are many wonderful publishers who are not terrific managers; there are many terrific managers who are not inspiring publishers. There are perhaps some inspiring publishers who are also somehow terrific managers but there is no way they are also brilliant fundraisers. Fiona is so good at all of these things. I have always admired the way that she is extremely ambitious for Graywolf and has very high expectations of herself and of her

For The Guardian, Moira Donegan discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and emphasizes that “the real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are—less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.” A recording of last week’s event on the state of reproductive rights in the US with Lux magazine, Verso Books, and Haymarket Books is available on YouTube now. Speakers Laurie Bertram Roberts, Monica Raye

Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Philip Montgomery On the Death Panel podcast, Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter discuss a recent New York Times Magazine cover story about gender therapy and medical transition. And at the New Inquiry, Gill-Peterson and Bea Adler-Bolton talk about anti-trans policies, with Gill-Peterson observing, “In the face of such dire circumstances, it’s stunning that some of the most visible criticisms of these laws have reduced them to the realm of identity politics, as if the difference between pro- and anti- trans is whether or not you rhetorically bless trans people.”  In her Substack, Jessica Valenti argues

Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Nikolas Coukouma/Wikicommons Science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler was born on this day in 1947. To celebrate, London’s NTS Radio is broadcasting a full day of programming in her honor. And at Public Books, Sasha Ann Panaram offers an appreciation of Butler’s work and introduces an essay by Sheila Liming and an interview with Lynell George. You can read more about Butler’s life and work in the Spring 2021 issue of Bookforum, in which Gabrielle Bellot reviewed a Library of America edition of her novels and short stories.  Electric Literature has announced “Both/And,” a forthcoming

Imogen Binnie For the New Yorker, Stephanie Burt writes about Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and the invention of the trans novel. First published in 2013, Nevada was just reissued by FSG. Burt notes that for  Binnie, “Authenticity, not uplift, is the point.”  In the summer issue of the Paris Review, Lidija Haas conducts an “Art of Fiction” interview with Sigrid Nunez. They discuss Nunez’s linear process, writing about one’s parents, corresponding with readers about loss, and more. Of her recent novel The Friend, Nunez said: “There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, ‘I want to

Margo Jefferson. Photo: © Claire Holt In the new issue of The Drift, Alexandra Kleeman, Christian Lorentzen, Tope Folarin, Hannah Gold, and more weigh in on the state of contemporary literary fiction: “​​Which styles are dying out, and which are flourishing? What’s changed since 2020, or even 2015? Glibly… did the pandemic kill autofiction?” BOMB magazine shares an archival interview with painter Duncan Hannah, who died on Saturday at the age of sixty-nine. In the 1982 interview, Simon Lane asked Hannah about his paintings of famous writers. Of James Joyce, the painter said: “People treat Joyce so seriously, and