A school district in Tennessee has voted to ban Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel, Maus, which depicts the Holocaust in a story about the author’s relationship with his father. The board took issue with a handful of curse words in the book and an image of a nude woman. Speigelman has called this focus “myopic” and told CNN that the decision “has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it.”
Clio Chang and Katie McDonough are moving to New York magazine’s Curbed. Chang, most recently a freelance writer, will cover “New York City’s built environment and the people and forces that shape it” as a news writer. McDonough, formerly the deputy editor of the New Republic, will work with print and web stories and features “about architecture, design, New York City real estate, and urbanism” as senior editor.
Maya Binyam has announced that her forthcoming novel, Hangman, has been sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
For the New York Times “Insider” column, writer Molly Young talks about her newsletter, “Read Like the Wind,” and life as a book critic. Young observes that even bad books can be instructive: “Even with a book that I dislike, my relationship with the book changes as I try to figure out what the author was trying to do. If the writing was not successful, it’s figuring out why.”
In The Baffler, Sophie Haigney reviews Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, a book of illustrated essays that consider the fate of objects that are no longer deemed useful (like ashtrays and zeppelins). Haigney writes, “Extinct is evidence that nothing is inevitable; things didn’t have to turn out this way, and things can be designed differently, keeping past failures in mind.”
On Tuesday evening next week, Olga Tokarczuk will discuss her novel, The Books of Jacob, which has recently been translated from Polish, with translator Jennifer Croft and Anderson Tepper, the co-chair of the International Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival. The conversation is free to attend and presented by Brooklyn Public Library with Greenlight Bookstore.
New York Times Business writer Marc Tracy is joining the Culture desk, where Rebecca Thomas is now a senior staff editor. Setareh Baig and Rachel Sherman also are joining Culture at the Times.