Saidiya Hartman. Photo: © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation For The Nation, Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary republication of her book Scenes of Subjection. Hartman discusses her unexpected path to writing the book: “I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery.” At the New Yorker, you can read an adapted version of Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s foreword

László Krasznahorkai. Photo: Nina Subin/New Directions The new issue of The Drift is online now, with Malcolm Harris on “ethical consumption under capitalism,” Tarpley Hitt on Hunter Biden, Noor Quasim on Annie Ernaux and “the millennial sex novel,” fiction by Percival Everett and others, an interview with Barbara Kruger, dispatches on the climate movement, and more.  For Astra magazine, Jared Marcel Pollen writes about two new books—Spadework for a Palace and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East—by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Pollen compares Krasznahorkai’s work

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian Penguin Random House’s bid to acquire Simon Schuster has been blocked by a federal judge, who noted that the proposed merger would harm competition in the publishing market “substantially.” Penguin Random House plans to appeal the decision.  The nine winners of the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant have been announced. The Whiting Foundation has posted videos from the recipients describing their works in progress and created a digital chapbook explaining the projects.  n+1 has brought back Bookmatch, the personalized reading list service that picks ten books for you based on a short personality quiz. You can

H. D. Photo: Wikimedia Commons The Center for Fiction has a special exhibition of Beowulf Sheehan’s portraits of Cormac McCarthy, which will be on display until December 13. Poet Gerald Stern—whose This Time: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998—has died at ninety-seven. In an obituary for the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that Stern “drew on nature, history and his own experiences to write prizewinning poetry laced with wistfulness, anger and humor.”  George R. R. Martin says that Winds of Winter, the next Game of Thrones novel, will be more than

Percival Everett. Photo: Michael Avedon/Graywolf Press Elon Musk has completed the deal to buy Twitter he initiated back in April after quietly accumulating shares starting in January. Musk reportedly has plans to unsuspend permanently banned accounts, like that of Donald Trump, and has little interest in moderating content and disinformation. In his recent Bookforum review of Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s Speculative Communities, Max Read wrote about Musk’s chaotic takeover “strategy”: “He hasn’t been pursuing a clear program, laid out from the beginning in the manner of a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, but embracing confusion and volatility and changing circumstances in the manner of

Hua Hsu  For the New Yorker, Hua Hsu remembers historian and writer Mike Davis, who died this week at the age of seventy-six. Hsu pushes back against the idea that Davis was “a prophet of doom,” instead arguing that the Marxist intellectual was at heart an optimist, dreamer, and fearless truth-teller. Hsu writes, “His books were so prophetic about the nature of terror. We must also trust that he was right to have faith in the future—in those who followed.”   On Thursday, November 3, The Drift will celebrate the release of its eight issue with a party in Brooklyn.

Mike Davis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Mike Davis, the activist, historian, and scholar, has died at age seventy-six. Jon Wiener, the coauthor of Davis’s latest book, offers a remembrance in The Nation. According to Wiener, “Mike hated being called ‘a prophet of doom.’ Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door. But when he wrote about climate change or viral pandemics, he was not offering a ‘prophecy’; he was reporting on the latest

Peter Schjeldahl. Photo: Ada Calhoun  Author, critic, and poet Peter Schjeldahl—whose books include Let’s See and Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light—has died at age eighty. The New Yorker has collected some of his signature pieces, including his essay from 2019, “The Art of Dying,” and David Remnick has written a remembrance. Yesterday, in his newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote, “I like The Hydrogen Jukebox but it’s not at all that important which collection you choose. Schjeldahl was relentlessly consistent. From his first column in the ‘70s on, you could not sell him a bill of goods or extinguish the love he

Bette Howland. Photo: Jacob Howland/A Public Space Online at n+1, Ava Kofman writes a remembrance of Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist who died earlier this month. “In a sense, Latour’s career was a matter of insisting that he meant most of the things he said, however unlikely they might sound,” Kofman writes. “Still, he occasionally found himself ‘squashed’ by the number of activities he’d thrown himself into. The CV he posted on his personal website was 112 pages long. His philosophical project didn’t lend itself to paraphrase, but one theme he returned to again and again was

Morgan Parker. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths. For The Atlantic, Charlie Tyson looks at two new books—The Choreography Of Everyday Life by Annie-B Parson and Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern by Neil Baldwin—to explain how dance and everyday movement inform each other. Writing about Parson, Tyson observes, “For her, dance is not a rarefied form. It is more like the natural, everyday motion of strolling down the street, which, after all, involves considerations of line, space, and tempo. City life, especially, requires dancelike coordination.” For more on Graham, see Claudia La Rocco’s review of Baldwin’s book in our current

Namwali Serpell. Photo: © Jordan Kines Photography On the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Jane Hu writes about Hilary Mantel’s double vision. Hu describes Mantel’s health issues and the way that these infirmities fed her writing process: “Writing enabled Mantel to locate herself in a body that felt increasingly alien. In the face of confusion and loss, she began to tell stories.”  In Gawker, a breakdown of how the new global news site Semafor is breaking down the news.  Sophie Haigney interviews Nancy Lemann for the Paris Review. Describing her first novel, The Lives of the Saints, Lemann says,

Shehan Karunatilaka Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction. You can watch the announcement on the Booker Prize YouTube channel.  LitHub has three short essays by poet Ross Gay. His new book of essays, Inciting Joy, will be published later this month. Gay contributed an essay to Bookforum’s summer issue on basketball, and took part in our video panel on sports and literature.  For Slate, Imogen West-Knights reports from a Gone Girl–themed cruise: “While I was on the boat, people at home texted me with concern, as though

Manuel Muñoz This week, on his Substack “Story Club,” George Saunders will be leading a discussion of Manuel Muñoz’s “Anyone Can Do It,” which appears in his story collection The Consequences, out from Graywolf Press this week. In addition to Saunders’s discussion, Muñoz will drop in to answer some reader questions.  Sadie Stein has been hired as the preview editor at the New York Times Book Review. A longtime contributor, Stein has also worked at Jezebel and the Paris Review. According to the paper’s announcement of Stein’s new position: “Preview editors must read hundreds of unreleased books each year

Serge Daney. Photo: Jean-Paul Fargier/Wikimedia Commons The T. S. Eliot Prize has announced its shortlist of ten new poetry collections. The winner will be announced in January.  Printed Matter’s 2022 NY Art Book Fair started yesterday and will continue all weekend on 22nd Street in Manhattan. The fair has a full slate of events, special projects, and programs, including a free block party on Saturday. The exhibitors include galleries, magazines, booksellers, artists, collectives, and more.  Los Angeles’s Mezzanine film series is hosting a tribute to the French film critic Serge Daney on Sunday. Ticketholders will receive a zine by

Kiese Laymon In the New York Times Magazine, Ismail Muhammad asks, “Can Black Literature Escape the Representation Trap?” Looking at recent fiction, and considering the debates about Black representation in literature stretching back to Baldwin, Wright, Hurston, and Morrison, Muhammad defines the stakes and limits of representation in literature, writing: “This is representation’s trap—the whittling down of Black life’s full scope into marketable, digestible facsimiles that are then thrust onto Black writers.”  The 2022 MacArthur Fellows have been announced.  In a preview of the new issue of The Drift, Noor Qasim writes about Annie Ernaux and the millennial sex

Vivian Gornick. Photo: Mitchell Bach The Paris Review has announced that critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick will receive the 2023 Hadada Award, the journal’s lifetime achievement prize. Mona Simpson, publisher of the Paris Review, said in a statement, “Gornick, like her admired Sebald, pulls off her enormously ambitious interior project—with brash, deep humor, and with a burning interrogation of the many selves she was before this one, here and now, the one talking to us from the page.” In a 2021 interview for Bookforum, Gornick told Emily Gould: “My preoccupation with internal self-division still compels me completely. That’s my

Still from Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. Photo: Courtesy United Artists. Via LitHub, the trailer for Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking. Leslie Jameson reviewed the book for the summer 2019 issue of Bookforum.  Astra magazine’s new issue, on “filth,” is online now. The editors write, “There is a moral element to filth. It is both what we have been taught to hide, and the subversive pleasure in revealing it.” The magazine’s second issue covers its subject in poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, and more. In Tablet magazine, J. Hoberman looks at the work of Diane Arbus, as David

Lydia Millet. Photo: Nola Millet For the New York Times Magazine, Christine Smallwood profiles Lydia Millet, whose latest novel, Dinosaurs, will be published next week. Millet lives in Arizona, where she works at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Writing and conservation are both aspects of vocation for me,” she tells Smallwood. “She wouldn’t feel like herself if she didn’t write novels and stories, but ‘it feels self-indulgent to do only that. It’s not the same as action.’”  In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Sigrid Nunez reviews Getting Lost, the newly translated 2001 diary by

Annie Ernaux. Photo: Catherine Hélie, Gallimard. The French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature. Ernaux, an autofiction innovator with about twenty works to her name, is published in the US by the indie press Seven Stories. The press tweeted an exuberant thread, including thanks for Ernauax’s English translators, Alison L. Strayer, Tanya Leslie, and Anna Moschovakis, and links to buy Ernaux hats and shirts with her name printed in a death-metal font. Bookshop.org is running a sale on her books (though most are now on backorder). Ernaux’s most recent book translated

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard Oprah Daily has the cover reveal for Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming novel The Late Americans, which will be published in May 2023 by Riverhead. Elon Musk is reportedly moving forward in his bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion.  For the New York Times, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes about country music star Loretta Lynn, who died this week at the age of ninety: “I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick