Paper Trail

Bhaskar Sunkara has been named president of “The Nation” magazine; Julian Lucas on Yoko Tawada’s anti-nationalist fiction


Bhaskar Sunkara. Photo: Jacobin

Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara has been named the new president of The Nation magazine. Editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel said of the new hire: “Bhaskar brings an entrepreneurial lens and a new generation of leadership to The Nation.” In the Spring 2019 issue of Bookforum, Frank Guan reviewed Sunkara’s book, Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.  

Melville House is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with book giveaways, a new website, and a party planned for this September. Since it was founded by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians in 2002, the press has published over seven hundred books. 

For the New Yorker, Julian Lucas writes about Yoko Tawada’s “anti-nationalist vision of language and translation.” Tawada—whose latest novel, Scattered All Over the Earth, was translated by Margaret Mitsutani—writes in both Japanese and German, sometimes alternating between the two in a single work, as in The Naked Eye (2004). Tawada’s new novel follows a woman named Hiruko seeking asylum in Scandinavia, where she has invented a new language. Of the novel’s ambition to straddle “a high concept fairy tale and a realist novel,” Lucas reflects: “Perhaps a novel about the messy birth of a language isn’t supposed to sound ‘natural,’ a concept that Tawada has always viewed with suspicion.” 

For the fourth installment of the Oxonian Review’s “On Notes” series, Lauren Michele Jackson shares some of the notes she made while writing a piece on Zora Neale Hurston. Other contributors to the series so far include Agnes Callard, David A. Bell, and Jodi Dean.

Tonight at 7pm Eastern, 92Y will host a discussion of Apple TV’s new documentary, Lincoln, with Jelani Cobb, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Cheryl Wills.