Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet from Gaza and winner of the American Book Award, was detained and reportedly beaten by the IDF after being stopped with his family at a military checkpoint on Sunday while trying to cross the border into Egypt. He has since been released in Gaza. Diana Buttu, a former PLO spokesperson and family friend of Abu Toha’s, has said that he is now with his family, and told the New York Times that “he was likely freed because of public pressure, including from publications like The New Yorker magazine, which Mr. Abu Toha has contributed to, and the free speech organization PEN America.”
The staff of Lapham’s Quarterly has been indefinitely furloughed by the board of directors overseeing the publication, which has been on hiatus since October. “We do not know whether the Quarterly has a future,” the staff wrote in a statement. “We are still shocked by this news.”
The New York Review of Books has published an open letter by several scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism expressing “dismay and disappointment” about how public figures and politicians have invoked the memory of the Holocaust “to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel.” They write: “There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine, and deploying a Holocaust narrative in which an ‘evil’ must be vanquished by force will only perpetuate an oppressive state of affairs that has already lasted far too long.”
The English novelist and literary critic A. S. Byatt died last Thursday at the age of eighty-seven. She is survived by her sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble. As a graduate student at Oxford in the late 1950s, Byatt was told by her Ph.D. supervisor, “My dear, every young girl with a first-class degree expects to be able to write a good novel. None of them can.” In 1990, Byatt won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession. “I think most of my life I’ve felt very lucky, because I expected not to be able to write books,” she said in 2016. “And I never really wanted to do anything else.”
At Interview, Andrew Hopf has compiled an extensive index “cheat sheet” to Barbra Streisand’s 900-plus page memoir. Hopf includes some choice quotes: “Anna Karenina was also the first classic novel I ever read. I went straight from Nancy Drew to Tolstoy.”