Bookforum editors
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 […] 
At Dissent, Gabriel Winant offers post-election analysis, outlining how Democratic leadership has “comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute […] 
The Fall 2024 issue of Bookforum is out now! In this edition: A. S. Hamrah on Agnès Varda’s stunning and nonlinear career, Brandon Taylor on the novels of Sally Rooney, Justin Taylor on getting lost and found in the Bob Dylan archives, Charlotte Shane and Jamie Hood in conversation, Christian Lorentzen on Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, […] 
The poet and translator Anne Carson will receive the Paris Review’s 2025 Hadada Award, which recognizes “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Reviewing Carson’s latest book, Wrong Norma, in the Winter 2024 issue of Bookforum, Jennifer Krasinski observed: “It is a fitting irony that […] 
At The New Inquiry, read the Palestinian Youth Movement’s statement marking one year since October 7: “It will take decades to understand the scale of the violence Palestinians have endured this year. The grief across the Arab world is unfathomable. Our children are not numbers. They are among the two million forgotten by a world […] 
The fall issue of the Paris Review is out now, with prose by Josephine Baker and Morgan Thomas, poetry by Hannah Arendt and Sara Gilmore, interviews with Rosemarie Waldrop and Javier Cercas, and more. Online at n+1, read A. S. Hamrah on a sampling of this summer’s movies. On Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs: “Ordinary things like […]