Paper Trail

Celeste Ng sells new novel to Penguin Press; Matt Zoller Seitz remembers critic Terry Teachout


Celeste Ng. © Kieran Kesner

At Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz has written a wonderful tribute to critic Terry Teachout, whose books include biographies of George Balanchine, H. L. Mencken, and Duke Ellington. “Terry believed you could find good art almost anywhere, and that you would be more likely to believe this if more big-city journalists would make a commitment to leave their regional comfort zones and seek it out,” Seitz writes. “In my conversations with him, he sometimes referred to this philosophy as ‘truffle-hunting,’ because ‘you’re not going to experience a lot of the good stuff if you wait for a PR person to tell you about it. You need to go out in the forest and find it.’”

Michael Schur, who created the TV series The Good Place, has a new book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which will be released tomorrow. 

Book critic Christian Lorentzen will perform in Matthew Gasda’s new play, Dimes Square, which will premiere on February 13. According to the press release: “The assembled scenesters could be the worst people in New York City or merely the latest not quite innocent revelers in a permanent pageant of seduction and betrayal, selling out and seeking second acts, burning the candle at both ends and burning out. Are they real artists or just chasers of hype and chasers of the night?” You can purchase tickets here

Penguin Press has bought the new novel by Celeste Ng, the author of Little Fires Everywhere. According to the publisher, the new book, titled Our Missing Hearts, is set in the US in the near future, when, “after years of economic decline and unrest, a set of laws aimed at maintaining ‘American culture’ ban books deemed unpatriotic, among other things.” The book will be released in October. 

Tonight at 7:30pm Eastern time, Jessie Greengrass (Sight: A Novel) will discuss her second novel, The High House, with fellow novelist Lydia Millet. Among the questions they will address: “How do we understand and experience love, family, sacrifice, and hope anew under the threat of extinction?”