Annie Ernaux’s latest novel, The Young Man, was published in English translation today. Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, was profiled in May by Rachel Cusk in the New York Times Magazine. You can read an excerpt of the novel in Vogue and a review by Jamie Hood in the new issue of Bookforum.
The legendary independent bookstore City Lights is celebrating its seventieth birthday this year. The San Francisco store will host a full slate of poetry readings, book talks, and online panels and discussions.
Kaitlin Phillips shares three books she’s read recently. Considering Elfriede Jelinek’s brutal novel The Piano Teacher, Phillips writes, “I don’t usually like this sort of book actually (austere, cynical, antiquated?) and if I were to recommend something from Austria, I’d lazily push Bernhard, who, as far as I’m concerned, can do no wrong, and is the funniest ‘Angry guy’ in the world.”
The 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes have been announced.
Michael S. Roth’s The Student: A Short History was published today by Yale University Press. Roth has been writing op-eds on the book’s themes this month, including a piece in today’s New York Times about the true value of an education. He writes that students today “are learning freedom by learning who they are and what they can do (including how they might think). This almost always happens in concert with others.”
On The Point magazine’s Selected Essays podcast, Ryan Ruby discusses Susan Sontag’s 1973 essay “Approaching Artaud” and his own essay on T .S. Eliot from the Poetry Foundation. In the new Bookforum, Ruby reviewed Brian Dillon’s latest and considered the question of critical temperament.