Friends, editors, and readers mourn the unexpected loss of fiction writer Anthony Veasna So, who died this week at age twenty-eight. So had published stories in n+1, the New Yorker, and Granta, and his debut collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming this summer.
At The Nation, Billie Allen writes about his friend Brandon Bernard, the ninth inmate to be executed since the Justice Department ended a seventeen-year moratorium on capital punishments in July. There are at least four more executions scheduled before Inauguration day. For more on Bernard’s case, see E. Tammy Kim’s New Yorker piece from November.
For LitHub, Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham talk about their new anthology, Black Futures, with Rasheeda Saka. On the book’s genesis, the authors told Saka: “Black Futures started as all great contemporary love stories do—on an app! Back in 2015, we connected over Twitter DM and began to ideate on what it would mean to create a multimedia project that could get its arms around some of the cultural flourishing across intersections that we’d observed online and in the world.”
In a report for the New York Times investigating “Why Is Publishing So White?,” Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek worked with research assistants to analyze English-language fiction books published by top houses since 1950. Of the 7,124 books examined, 95 percent were written by white authors. L. L. McKinney, the author who started the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag this summer, told So and Wezerek, “It’s amusing to me when publishers say that they follow the market. They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism.”
The National Book Foundation is enlisting the service of a headhunter from Koya Partners to lead the search to replace Lisa Lucas as executive director. Lucas will leave the foundation in July to serve as senior vice president and publisher of the Pantheon and Schocken imprints at Penguin Random House.
Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore has been sold to local investors David Back and Kwame Spearman, making the chain the nation’s largest Black-owned indie bookstore. This past summer, former owners neglected to take a public stance on the Black Lives Matter movement. Spearman, who will serve as CEO, is a “strong supporter of BLM,” and told Denverite.com “Colorado needs Tattered Cover, and Tattered Cover needs Colorado.”
Join Artforum and Bookforum on Tuesday, December 15 for a virtual conversation with artists Reynaldo Rivera and Linda Simpson, hosted by Artforum reviews editor Alex Jovanovich.