Bookforum editors
Jamie Hood discusses her book Trauma Plot: A Life—which is out today—with Nicholas Russell at Defector: “I think that the reason it took me 10 years to write Trauma Plot was because rape ultimately seemed to me like a formal problem. Like, I could not figure out how to tell the fucking story.” In the […] 
The spring issue of the Yale Review is out now, with contributions by Tiana Reid, Audrey Wollen, Mona Oraby, Isabella Hammad, Guadalupe Nettel, and more. On March 19th, 4Columns magazine is hosting “Manifesto,” a free event at KGB bar in New York City. The six participants—Brian Dillon, Johanna Fateman, Ciarán Finlayson, Harmony Holiday, Alex Kitnick, […] 
Amulet, a new magazine “offering a fresh perspective on spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike” has launched; Samuel Rutter is editor in chief. The first issue is online now, with essays, poetry, and fiction by Brittany Newell, K-Ming Chang, Fady Joudah, Simon Critchley, Yasmine Seale, and more. In her essay, Sheila Heti […] 
This year’s Booker Prize longlist has been announced. All thirteen nominated authors have been nominated for the first time this year, and three authors are nominated for their debut books. The shortlist will be announced on April 8. Online at the Paris Review this week: Lisa Carver’s diary of an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, excerpted […] 
The winter issue of The Point, “American Realism,” is now online, with an editor’s letter by Becca Rothfeld assessing the art and culture of the “liberal resistance” that thrived during Trump’s first administration and why she won’t pretend to be able to predict what will come in the next four years, Jessi Jezewska Stevens on […] 
The Winter 2025 issue of Bookforum is out now! This edition features Audrey Wollen on Joy Williams’s stories of angels, demons, and the fate of humanity; Hermione Hoby on narratives of marriage and its dissolution; Jessi Jezewska Stevens on Ágota Kristóf’s confounding fictions of exile. On the cover is artist and poet Joe Brainard’s 1968 […] 
On the Know Your Enemy podcast, Erik Baker talks about his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. Writing recently in the New Yorker, Anna Wiener notes that self-help-influenced ideas about work being a path to personal fulfillment may seem like a new phenomenon, but “Baker argues that the […] 
The renowned poet, civil rights activist, and longtime Virginia Tech professor of English Nikki Giovanni has died at the age of eighty-one. Giovanni came up during the Black Arts Movement, self-publishing her debut collection of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk in 1968 with the help of friends. She went on to publish more than twenty-five […] 
In the Irish Times, Sally Rooney writes about the climate crisis: “We know what’s already happening around us. And we know what’s coming next. When are we going to have the courage to stop it?” Citing Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Rooney discusses how capitalist impunity poses an existential threat. “Multinational corporations […] 
Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, about six astronauts on the International Space Station, is the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Joel Simon argues that journalists covering Trump’s second term may benefit from taking an approach akin to that of a foreign correspondent. Simon talked with Suzy Hansen, whose book Notes […]