Hanif Abdurraqib Michael Robbins—author of the poetry collection Alien Vs. Predator and the essay collection Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music—just announced that he has another book in the works: “contract signed for my third book of poems, Walkman. scheduled for early ’21 if civilization hasn’t collapsed.” The Verge has posted a video of a conversation between Marlon James and George R.R. Martin, in which the authors dwell on genre, violence, and a writer’s concerns about audience. The Paris Review has posted the first installment of poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on
Carmen Maria Machado. Photo: Tom Storm Literary Hub’s Emily Temple writes that it’s time to recognize Sally Rooney as more than just a “millennial writer.” “In the same way that praising novels as ‘timely’ unintentionally undercuts their worth—suggesting that they have an expiration date, that their contents are only important in the moment—defining a writer by her generation, especially a generation so roundly mocked and fretted over, feels like a subtle undermining of her abilities,” she explains. The 2019 Guggenheim Fellows have been announced. Recipients include Carmen Maria Machado, Catherine Lacey, and Julia Bryan-Wilson. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer
Rachel Cusk. Photo: Jaime Hogge The shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize has been announced. Nominees include Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, Annie Ernaux’s The Years, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, among others. The winner will be announced in May. The Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Huevel will step down in June. Editor-at-large D. D. Guttenplan will replace her. “It’s possible to stay in a job too long,” she told the New York Times in an interview. “It’s a time of tectonic shifts, and a new editor is part of
Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux talks to The Guardian about aging, privilege, and and why she avoids “I” even when writing autobiography. “When I think of my life, I see my story since childhood until today, but I cannot separate it from the world in which I lived; my story is mixed with that of my generation and the events that happened to us,” she explains. “This is the story of events and progress and everything that has changed in 60 years of an individual existence but transmitted through the ‘we’ and ‘them.’ The events in my book belong to
Meghan Daum The Hugo and Nebula award winner Vonda N. McIntyre—whose science-fiction novels, including Dreamsnake, put women at the center of a genre that had typically been dominated by male protagonists—has died. “The modern feminist movement was just gaining steam,” McIntyre recalled in a 2010 interview. “And there was a lot of controversy in science fiction about whether women should have anything to do with science fiction at all, which I actually found quite hurtful.” Sally Rooney, George Saunders, Emily Ruskovich, and Mathias Énard are among the ten writers shortlisted for the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award. “Since at
Ruth Reichl. Photo: Michael Singer At Columbia Journalism Review, Allison Salerno explains how her own journalistic standards changed after interviewing undocumented immigrants for an article on a municipal policy in Georgia that withholds water service from residents without Social Security numbers. On the centennial of his flight from Russia, Stacy Schiff examines the ways that Vladimir Nabokov’s life as a refugee influenced his writing. Ruth Reichl talks to the LA Times about money, machismo, and her new book, Save Me the Plums. “I never found the restaurant culture one bit different than the publishing culture. We all knew about
Miriam Toews. Photo: Carol Loewen Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram wonders if Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Washington Post op-ed calling for regulations on Facebook, as well as a nascent plan to pay publishers for content it posts on the platform, are “a genuine attempt to help media, or another part of a long-running PR campaign by a company desperately afraid of getting caught on the wrong side of antitrust legislation?” Adweek reports that Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg, who recently bought Gawker, The Outline, and Mic, has plans to continue expanding his media empire. At the Los Angeles Review of Books,
Irin Carmon At New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Irin Cameron wonders why the Washington Post killed her and Amy Britton’s story on 60 Minutes producer Jeff Fager’s history of sexual harassment. “I’d believed, in the fevered months of #MeToo, that journalism could swoop in where other institutions had failed to hold big-league abusers accountable,” she writes, recounting her story. “But what would unspool that spring was a lesson beyond any one story or media organization. It was about the limits, despite undeniable progress, of journalistic institutions to tell these stories of sexual misconduct.” Politico global editor Matt Kaminski has succeeded
Amy Hempel. Photo: Vicki Topaz Gallery Books is publishing a new book by Meghan Daum this October. The Problem With Everything: A Journey Through the Culture Wars is “about calling out the tribalistic click-bait of the current moment and finding a way back to rational thought and intellectual honesty.” Daum also “offers a crucial theory about the divide between Gen Xers, who fetishize toughness above all, and Millennials, who fetishize fairness.” Former Splinter reporter David Ubert is joining Vice News as a media reporter. At Electric Literature, Jennifer Baker talks to Namwali Serpell about the intersection of race and
John Cook Bustle Digital has bought The Outline, Recode reports. Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg first met with Outline founder Josh Topolsky last fall. “I went into the conversation with high skepticism — ‘Okay, let’s hear this bullshit,’” Toplosky said. “I did not go into the room expecting for us to hit it off.” Topolsky says that he will continue to run the website and that his current staff will join him. Former Gawker executive editor John Cook is joining Business Insider as investigations editor. The Marshall Project has launched a print publication. News Inside will be distributed in jails
Marcel Proust The Mueller Report hasn’t been made public, and it remains unclear if it ever will be, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a number-one bestseller on Amazon. If the report is released, Simon and Schuster is ready to publish it, and created placeholder pages that announce the book. As Publishing Perspectives points out, those placeholder announcements do not indicate how many pages the book will be—because no one in the publishing world knows how long the report actually is. Cafe Loup, the West Village bar and bistro that has for years been a go-to for people
Claudia Rankine Graywolf has acquired a new book by Claudia Rankine. Just Us: An American Conversation will be an essay collection that interrogates “white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness,” and many more aspects of white supremacy in American culture. Just Us will be published in September 2020. Medium deputy editor Katie Drummond is joining Vice as senior vice president of Vice Digital. Drummond was previously the executive editor of the Outline and editor in chief of Gizmodo. At Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen explores Medium’s history and wonders if the company’s most recent
Mira Jacob Journalist and former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin has sold a book on right-wing extremists to Hachette. Culture Warlords will be “an account of ‘a mouthy Jewish broad from New York’ and her encounters with the byzantine online world of white supremacists, tracing the movement’s growth, schisms, and the threat it poses to the 2020 election.” Melville House is publishing the Mueller Report as its first mass-market paperback ever. Skyhorse Publishing and Scribner are also planning on publishing their own versions of the report. At BOMB, Emily Raboteau talks to Mira Jacob about privacy, VH1’s Pop-Up Video,
Fran Lebowitz The finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, which will be announced on April 15, haven’t been made public, but at Vanity Fair, Joe Pompeo speculates on which journalists are currently considered to be the top contenders (Carlos Lozado and Jill Lepore are favorites for criticism). As for nonfiction books, John Carreyrou’s best-selling Bad Blood, about the scandal-ridden billion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos, “is a strong candidate for nonfiction books.” Critic Sasha Frere-Jones has started a new blogletter in which he “will be writing about books, performances, albums, bagels, songs, time, bagels, oil paint, coffee, film crews on Avenue
Lynne Tillman Former Details editor Dan Peres has been hired as the editor in chief of the new Gawker.com. Peres told the New York Times that the site won’t try to emulate the style of the original Gawker. “In the later years they probably took things too far. . . . There was a lot of gratuitous meanness and sort of misguided decision-making,” Peres said. “There’s an opportunity to draw on the great things that they did and dismiss some of the not-great things that they did.” Vulture has confirmed that André Aciman’s sequel to Call Me by Your
Tressie McMillan Cottom The New York Times remembers Rachel Ingalls, the recently-rediscovered author of Mrs. Caliban, who died earlier this month. Around the time New Directions began republishing her books in 2017, Ingalls also received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. But according to her sister, Sarah Daughn, “the diagnosis had an unexpected effect” on the author and Ingalls “began to enjoy the recognition that had long eluded her.” “She was so happy,” Daughn told the Times in an interview. “She was getting to say everything she wanted to say. Jennifer Finney Boylan has sold a new book to Celadon.
Ottessa Moshfegh The shortlist for the 2019 Wellcome Prize has been announced. Nominees include Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, among others. “They ask difficult questions . . . they blend personal with scientific research, cultural with historical, they are very creative,” judging chair Elif Shafak said of the six shortlisted books. “And these voices are very honest. They are unflinching, very candid, even when they’re across difficult subjects.” The winner will be announced in May. Journalist and The Everything Store author Brad Stone is working on a new book about Amazon.
Marlon James The 2019 Windham-Campell Awards have been announced. Danielle McLaughlin and David Chariandy have won for fiction; Raghu Karnad and Rebecca Solnit for nonfiction; Ishion Hutchinson and Kwame Dawes for poetry; and Young Jean Lee and Patricia Cornelius for drama. Each author will receive $165,000. W.S. Merwin, the former U.S. Poet Laureate who won two Pulitzers and a National Book Award, has died at ninety-one. In an interview at Desert Island Discs, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, recalls his struggles growing up gay in Jamaica. When he was young, he wanted to not be gay