The Our Struggle podcast has released its two-hour interview with translator and biographer Benjamin Moser (Sontag): “We spent 2 hours talking to Pulitzer Prize Winner & gentleman philologist Benjamin ‘Ben’ Moser about translation, being hot, the Canon, writing, Adidas and much much more.”
The New York Times’s Ben Smith weighs in on “why we’re freaking out about Substack.” “Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions,” he writes. “For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales. This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about ‘cancel culture’ . . . are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were.”
Publishers Weekly profiles Fable, the new digital platform for book clubs that “allows users to join clubs moderated by experts, authors, and influencers, or to start their own clubs.”
The Paris Review has added to the many tributes to New York Tyrant publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano. “Unlike so many, Gian actually treated outcasts like children of God. He loved them. His heart was bigger than any one person could contain; it overflowed out of him, into everyone he knew, and into the books he published,” writes Jordan Castro.
Semiotext(e) is publishing a new edition of Dodie Bellamy’s New Narrative cult classic The Letters of Mina Harker with an afterword by Emily Gould.
Random House has bought the rights to Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Oh, William! The book is about a man and woman, once married and now friends, who “unearth the kind of long-buried family secret that rearranges everything” they think they know about those closest to them.
Tonight at 7PM EST, McNally Jackson is hosting a virtual discussion of poet Cuban poet Severo Sarduy, featuring author Wayne Koestenbaum (The Cheerful Scapegoat), poet Raquel Salas Rivera (lo terciario/ the tertiary), and translator David Francis. You can RSVP here.