At the end of this month, n+1 will publish The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade, an anthology featuring contributions to the magazine by Andrea Long Chu, Tobi Haslett, Elizabeth Schambelan, Jesse McCarthy, A. S. Hamrah, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. On the LARB Radio Hour podcast, editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov discuss the book and their work at the magazine with Los Angeles Review of Books editor Medaya Ocher.
Colm Tóibín’s new book On James Baldwin is out now from Brandeis University Press. In an excerpt published by the Paris Review, Tóibín writes: “From the beginning, [Baldwin] displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.”
In the new issue of The Drift, Melvin Backman writes about black resort towns in fiction, discussing Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, Dorothy West’s The Wedding, among other novels. “As displayed in these works, the black resort town embodies a larger dynamic, making clear how the symbols of black ambition—and so-called ‘black excellence’—can serve to paper over the elite’s indifference to the needs of the many.”
The summer issue of Jewish Currents is a themed issue on Florida with pieces on Miami’s right-wing Jewish community, left experiments in South Florida, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and more.
The Center for Fiction has announced the 2024 longlist for its First Novel Prize. Among the twenty-five nominees are Kaveh Akbar, Vanessa Chan, Kelly Link, Rita Bullwinkel, and Morgan Talty.