Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard The 2021 MacArthur “Genius” Grants have been announced. Among the twenty-five awardees are writers Hanif Abdurraqib, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Don Mee Choi. LitHub asked some of the literary awardees to share writing advice they have found helpful in their work. Poet Don Mee Choi said, “‘You can’t be afraid.’ This is basically what I tell myself all the time.” The New York Times Book Review takes stock of classic works of literature that were panned in the paper’s pages when the books were first published. Among the unfortunates were Virginia

Harsha Walia  Honorée Fanonne Jeffers announced on Twitter that she is writing a biography of poet Lucille Clifton. The book will be published in 2026 by Knopf. For The Drift, Sophie Haigney surveys children’s books written by or about political figures: Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Callista Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush, among many others, have all offered their thoughts on life and leadership to kids. These ideas are not subtle, as Haigney notes, “It seems many of us can no longer imagine that children can handle, and may in fact prefer, stories defined by

Cathy Park Hong The Brooklyn Book Festival will take place this Sunday, and this week it is hosting a number of live and virtual “Bookend” events, which will feature authors Yiyun Li, Brandon Taylor, Cathy Park Hong, Maggie Nelson, Tahir Hamut Izgil, Sarah Schulman, Hanif Abdurraqib, Colson Whitehead, Silvia Federici, and many others. On the latest episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, Parul Sehgal, who has just joined the magazine, talks about literature that describes trauma and atrocity. She discusses books she teaches in a class called “Writing the Unspeakable,” including Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War

Edward Said, 1983. Photo: Jean Mohr Following Daniel A. Gross’s story for the New Yorker and a Library Futures campaign effort, two members of Congress are requesting transparency from Big Five publishers regarding the prices they charge libraries for e-books. As Gross reported, the way e-books are licensed with expiration dates, like a lease, makes them much more expensive for libraries to provide than physical books. “E-books play a critical role in ensuring that libraries can fulfill their mission of providing broad and equitable access to information for all Americans, and it is imperative that libraries can continue their

Gregg Bordowitz. Photo: Justin Bettman. For Print magazine, R. E. Hawley writes about the new trend in book-cover designs: the blob. Hawley writes that the blob comes from big publishers playing it safe as they need bigger hits and have smaller budgets. The covers are meant to appeal to the Amazon algorithm, as past successful covers inspire similar designs. Hawley observes, “What gets lost in the pivot toward safe, reliably marketable design in literary fiction is in many ways the same thing we risk losing to Amazon’s algorithmically-driven vision of readership—the thrill of encountering the unexpected.” For The Drift,

Alexander Chee. Photo: M. Sharkey For the New Republic, Alexander Chee writes about the critical reception of E. M. Forster’s Maurice and a new book, Alec, by William di Canzio, that reimagines Forster’s novel from the perspective of his protagonist’s lover. But as Chee clarifies, “it is small to say di Canzio only sought to offer us a view of Maurice and Alec through Alec’s eyes.” The new novel “reunites Maurice with parts of Forster’s biography both close to Forster’s heart and missing from his fiction, even from Maurice—the courses he taught to working-class men after he finished up

N. Scott Momaday The New York Times Magazine has a feature on Gayl Jones, the pioneering Black writer whose new novel, Palmares, is her first in more than twenty years. Imani Perry writes of the prose, “While Jones is musical, her blue note always hits harder than any grace note. That is her effort to free the voice.” Tonight at 6:30pm EDT, the Paris Review and the Brooklyn Public Library present Return to Rainy Mountain, a film that follows N. Scott Momaday on a road trip based on the ancestral myths and legends presented in his book The Way

Amitava Kumar. Photo © Imrul Islam Amitava Kumar, whose novel A Time Outside This Time will be published in October, ponders Spike Lee, tennis, Nabokov, and much more, including the “arresting” quality he sought when he started writing fiction: “Plots are for dead people, but voice—oh, voice is how you know you’re alive.” Zando, the independent press that “connects inspiring authors to the audiences they deserve,” is continuing to build its team, hiring Chloe Texier-Rose (formerly of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to head its publicity department. In a statement released by Zando, Texier-Rose says: “As a book publicist, my

Daphne A. Brooks. Photo: Mara Lavitt/Harvard University Press Daphne A. Brooks has won the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution, her study of Black feminist sound and the archive. For more on Brooks’s work, read Rawiya Kameir’s review in the summer issue of Bookforum. The longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction was announced yesterday. Among the nominees are Hanif Abdurraqib for A Little Devil in America, Grace M. Cho for Tastes Like War, and Clint Smith for How the Word Is Passed. Today, the nominees in the fiction category

Jackie Wang. Photo: Tony Rinaldo. The National Book Awards longlist for poetry was announced today, following the list for young people’s literature and books in translation, which were announced yesterday. The nominated poets include Martín Espada, Desiree C. Bailey, Forrest Gander, and Jackie Wang, among others. The nonfiction longlist is expected later this afternoon. At the Yale Review, new fiction from Brandon Taylor. For Lit Hub, Jen DeGregorio looks into the story behind a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair, which is selling for $450,000. Is the sample real? Was it stolen? The answers involve the poet James Merril, who

Ruth Ozeki. Photo: Danielle Tait The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. It includes novels by Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, Maggie Shipstead, Anuk Arudpragasam, Damon Galgut, and Nadifa Mohamed. The Nation has hired Mohammed el-Kurd as a Palestine correspondent to cover the Israeli occupation and the Palestinain resistance. In a statement, the magazine wrote, “For too long Palestinian voices have been silenced, kept out of the US conversation simply for trying to share the Palestinian experience. We will not be intimidated into maintaining that silence.” Erin Overbey, the New Yorker’s archive editor, has compiled public data on the lack

Molly Young The New York Times has announced three new hires for the Books section: Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs are joining as staff critics and Jennifer Wilson is becoming a contributing essayist to the Book Review. For Columbia Journalism Review, Clio Chang writes about the political evolution of Teen Vogue, which is regrouping after the resignation of editor in chief Alexi McCammond. The magazine hired a new editor this May, and Chang observes that “the mood today . . . teeters between positivity and nihilism; Teen Vogue staffers are fully aware of the strange tension in producing justice-oriented

Yiyun Li. Photo: Christopher Ho Tomorrow, A Public Space will publish Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, in which Yiyun Li, the author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, recounts her rereading of Tolstoy with an online book club during the pandemic. “I’ve found that the more uncertain life is,” Li writes, “the more solidity and structure War and Peace provides.” The book includes contributions from Garth Greenwell, Elliott Holt, Carl Phillips, Tom Drury, Sara Majka, Alexandra Schwartz, and hundreds of fellow readers from around the world. The Dorothy Publishing

Marlowe Granados Ashley M. Jones has been named Alabama’s poet laureate. Jones is the state’s first Black poet laureate and the youngest writer to hold the title. She recently talked with NPR about her new book of poems, Reparations Now!: “What I mean when I say reparations is that I want what we are owed, which means for me as a Black person, I want to be able to walk into a room with my hair however it is fixed, with my skin as dark or as light as it is, and not feel immediately targeted.” Tonight, Powerhouse arena

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Wayne Lawrence At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter talks with Colson Whitehead about his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, and his flexibility as a writer. “His heterogeneous style comes not so much from an effort to show his range but from a short attention span,” Alter writes. As Whitehead puts it, this “prevents me from getting bored—that’s the main thing . . . . Like, why can’t I just do a zombie novel? No reason, just do it. So, with this, can I do a heist novel? Yeah, sure. Why not?” For more on Harlem Shuffle,

Judith Butler. Photo: Verso Hours after publishing an interview with Judith Butler yesterday, The Guardian removed whole paragraphs of the interview, apparently “folding” under pressure from transphobic readers. In the removed section, Butler answered a question about the alliance between far-right groups and certain factions of feminism in part by denouncing trans-exclusionary radical feminists as fascists. As Emanuel Maiberg reports for Motherboard, “it is exceedingly rare for long passages to be cut from articles with such a cryptic update note, and is even rarer for a question-and-answer to be deleted from a high profile interview without any real explanation

Colson Whitehead, 2019. Wayne Lawrence The new issue of Bookforum is out today! Our fall-fiction package includes reviews of novels by Colson Whitehead, Joy Williams, Miriam Toews, Jonathan Franzen, Tao Lin, and Percival Everett, plus an interview with Asali Solomon. Also in the magazine: James Hannaham’s diary on Fernando Pessoa and flying; Charlotte Shane’s consideration of Maggie Nelson, freedom, and care; Daphne Merkin’s reassessment of the hated and celebrated D. H. Lawrence; and more. In The Baffler, Dana Kopel writes about working to unionize staff of the New Museum, and the museum unionization movement taking hold across the country:

Salman Rushdie. Photo: Syrie Moskowitz For the New Republic, Alex Shephard considers the possibility that Substack will repopularize serialized fiction, and finds it “highly unlikely.” Novelist Salman Rushdie is the latest high-profile writer to join the platform, but as Shephard notes, the author of Midnight’s Children seems more intent on using it as a blog—another supposedly outdated but resilient technology. The speculation about how books will change with the times is well-worn: “For years, people have been predicting that the internet would radically upend the future of literature and yet, stubbornly, literature has refused to change.” At Gawker, Charlotte

Lizzie Johnson. Photo: Scott Strazzante  At The Nation, Emma Hager interviews Lizzie Johnson, one of the first American reporters to cover fire full-time, and the author of Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive and American Wildfire, an examination of the 2018 Camp “megafire.” Terminology used to describe increasingly destructive fires has changed rapidly, Johnson notes: “There was the Thomas Fire in 2017, which was the biggest in state history, and it held that title for less than a year before the Mendocino Complex Fire toppled it. And then in 2020 we had the ‘gigafire,’ which was the first time

Sheila Heti. Photo: Sylvia Plachy At Literary Hub, Sheila Heti writes about the people who she trusts to read early drafts of her work and the importance of these relationships to her process: “It’s always important to show a work in progress to more than one person at a time, so that nobody’s opinion is too influential. What if you show it to only one person and they hate it? And you believe them! Or they love it? And you believe them! Better to send it to two, three or four people, so that you can situate the truth