In the Indian Express, novelist and essayist Amitava Kumar writes an open letter to Hadi Matar, the man who has been arrested for stabbing Salman Rushdie: “Listen, you are young and I understand you will only be sitting in a room doing nothing for many, many years. I hope you will find time to read this letter. The world learned last week that you are 24. The man you tried to kill is 75. I don’t know about you but when I was 24, I was reading that man’s writings with great devotion. You might even say I was a bit fanatical in my habit.”
Salman Rushdie has reportedly been taken off of the ventilator and is able to talk.
Esquire’s Sophie Vershbow reports on the Penguin Random House trial, and talks with publishing insiders that explain what will happen to publishing if the DOJ antitrust case fails and PRH is allowed to purchase Simon & Schuster. “When one company controls most of the market, they can do whatever they want,” an anonymous marketing director who used to work for PRH says to Vershbow. “Raise prices, crummy production values, terrible terms that make it harder for stores to stay open.”
The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning book critic Carlos Lozada is joining the New York Times op-ed section.
Rob Doyle pays homage to the late, great cultural critic Mark Fisher, whose analytical writings on music and pop culture have been collected in Ghosts of My Life.
On the Know Your Enemy podcast, Chris Lehmann discusses Culture of Narcissism author Christopher Lasch, whose hard-to-pin-down theories have been championed by an array of figures from the left and the right.