The Booker Prize–winning novelist Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution under India’s harsh anti-terror laws for comments she made about Kashmir fourteen years ago. The writer Amitav Ghosh wrote on X: “The hounding of Arundhati Roy is absolutely unconscionable. She is a great writer and has the right to her opinion. There should be an international […]
Literary Hub has published an excerpt from The Uptown Local, Cory Leadbeater’s memoir about the nine years he spent as Joan Didion’s assistant and friend. Leadbeater writes about learning to avoid small talk around Didion and recalls her matter-of-fact way of dealing with problems and giving advice: “We’ve got to get to the bottom of […]
The summer issue of the Yale Review asks: “What do we need from criticism?” In her editor’s note, Meghan O’Rourke introduces essays by Christine Smallwood, Merve Emre, Namwali Serpell, Teju Cole, and Brian Dillon, among others. In her essay “A Reviewer’s Life,” Bookforum contributor Christine Smallwood argues that criticism is always an autobiographical act: “In […]
The 2024 International Booker Prize has been awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck for her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. Erpenbeck has said of the book, “It’s a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that […]
Alice Munro, the Canadian author of fourteen original short-story collections, has died at the age of ninety-two. Munro’s 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was seen as a triumph for the art of the short story; the Swedish Academy described her as a master of the genre, echoing many critics, readers, and writers including Cynthia Ozick, […]
The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. The Pulitzer Board gives this year’s Special Citations to the late critic and musician Greg Tate (1957–2021) and to journalists covering the war in Gaza. At the New Republic, Alex Shephard writes about the disingenuous media coverage of the antiwar protests on college campuses. Coverage focused on […]
As students have taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia, more than 2500 professors, academics, writers have pledged to boycott Columbia University and Barnard College. In an open letter, the signatories write, “We stand in full solidarity with the brave students, clerical staff, graduate workers, post-doctoral workers, and faculty at Columbia, Barnard, and Teacher’s College resisting […]
Student journalists at Columbia University have extensive ongoing coverage of the Gaza solidarity encampment, ongoing negotiations between student representatives and school administrators over the protests, and the academic boycott of Columbia and Barnard, which more than 1,400 academics support. The campus radio station, WKCR is covering the protests live, and has been offering on-the-ground reporting […]
Anne Carson LitHub reports on the PEN Awards and World Voices festival, which “are on the brink of collapse” over the organization’s response to Gaza. So far, twenty-nine authors have withdrawn from consideration for the prizes, including nine of the ten nominees PEN/Jean Stein Award, which pays $75,000. In The Nation, Gaby Del Valle reviews Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, about the crisis at the US southern border. Authors Lauren Groff and James McBride are among Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of
Annie Finch. Photo: Penguin Random House © Helen Peppe This Thursday at the Brooklyn Public Library, contributors to Choice Words, a collection of literature on abortion, will discuss their work with editor Annie Finch. Mahogany Brown, Desiree Cooper, Camonghe Felix, Kristen Ghodsee, Katha Pollitt, and Manisha Sharma will participate in the discussion. In the new issue of Harper’s, Daniel Bessner writes about how streaming and conglomeration have hollowed out Hollywood and made middle-class film and TV writing jobs a thing of the past. The industry today increasingly favors adapting existing IP and avoids risk whenever possible. “It seems like buyers
Lisa Borst. Photo: Milo Walls. Lisa Borst has been named co-EIC of n+1, joining Mark Krotov and Dayna Tortorici. Borst was formerly the magazine’s web editor. This year’s ten Whiting Award winners were announced last night. You can read excerpts from their work online at NPR. Tonight, at McNally Jackson Seaport, the winners will read their work at an event hosted by New Yorker staff critic Parul Sehgal. Pantheon Books has announced that it will publish a new memoir by Helen Garner. The book—a memoir about being a grandparent, Australian football, and much more—was acquired by editor Lisa Lucas. On
Constance Debré, West Hollywood, 2022. Photo: © Monica Nouwens 2022. Ohio author Hanif Abdurraqib appeared on CBS Mornings today to discuss his new book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which mixes personal writing with reflections on LeBron James’s life story. “The alignment of the author’s life with that of its guiding spirit is made evident throughout the book. But it isn’t seamless, and it isn’t supposed to be,” Gene Seymour writes in his review for Bookforum. A preview from our spring issue is online now, with new reviews by Ann Manov, Lisa Borst, Christine Smallwood,
John Barth John Barth has died at the age of ninety-three. Barth was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and essays and a writing professor at Johns Hopkins, Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and Boston University. The Paris Review has unpaywalled his 1985 “Art of Fiction” interview with George Plimpton. Reflecting on his time in the library stacks as a Johns Hopkins student, Barth tells Plimpton, “I was impressed forever with the width as well as the depth of literature—just what a kid from the sticks, from the swamp, in my case, needed.” On Saturday, April 13th, at 6 pm, the People’s Forum in New York City will host a fundraiser for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Maryse Condé. Photo: Columbia University The Guadeloupean novelist, activist, and academic Maryse Condé has died at the age of ninety. Condé was the author of over twenty books including the multigenerational saga Segu. Her work was nominated twice for the International Booker Prize, and in 2018 she received the New Academy prize, a one-off award given in lieu of the Nobel that year. “As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant. This might have been misheard.” Read
Ross Perlin. Photo: Cecil Howell In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Melina Moe reads some of Toni Morrison’s rejection letters to authors from her time as an editor at Random House. Moe writes, “Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press.” On March 17, n+1 is hosting an event in its Brooklyn office. Ross Perlin will discuss his new book, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered
Percival Everett. Photo: Michael Avedon For the Cleveland Review of Books, Mark Twain scholar Matt Seybold reviews Percival Everett’s new novel James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim: “James has locked Huck in a forever embrace, their destinies indissoluble. It reminds me of Baldwin’s prophecy: Race in the US must become either an embrace of lovers, prepared to ‘dare everything’ in order to ‘change the history of the world’ (‘Call it progress,’ Everett’s James says) or, like two boxers in a permanent clinch, we wait for ‘cosmic vengeance,’ looking each other in the
Becca Rothfeld Bookforum contributor and Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld discusses fairness and perspective in criticism and her forthcoming essay collection All Things Are Too Small in an interview with Nicholas Russell for Defector. For her contribution to the Yale Review’s “Objects of Desire” column, Leslie Jamison writes about “a gift from my aunt: a heavy wooden box full of hundred-year-old microscope slides she had unearthed in a London antique shop.” At Vulture, James Yeh reviews Percival Everett’s new novel James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim: “It’s in keeping
Sally Rooney. Photo: Macmillan In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, novelist Sally Rooney writes about how President Biden’s friendly visit with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar this weekend “neatly illustrates the Irish Government’s approach to the war on Gaza.” Rooney describes how the Irish government reserves “strong straightforward criticism” for the state of Israel while treating the United States “as a kind of neutral third party,” despite the fact that the US supplies around 80 percent of Israel’s imported weapons in addition to billions of dollars of aid. “What is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s
Vinson Cunningham. Photo: Jane Bruce. The UK–based Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its 2024 longlist, which includes Maya Binyam’s Hangman, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, and more. Tonight, Vinson Cunningham will discuss his new novel Great Expectations with Doreen St. Felix at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. Recently, Cunningham discussed his not-very-Dickensian book about coming of age as a staffer on the first Obama campaign with David Remnick, recalling that the title first came up as a joke from a colleague. Cunningham says of Obama’s role in public life after his presidency: “I will admit that
Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz Online at n+1, Erik Baker writes about Aaron Bushnell, the US’s illegal use of incendiary weapons on civilians, and the history of self-immolation as protest. “The purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.” PEN America has announced
