Gilbert Cruz, the Culture editor of the New York Times, will be the paper’s next Books editor, succeeding Pamela Paul. In a press release, the Times announced that Cruz will work to “reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age.”
Art in America’s second annual Summer Reading issue is out now, with Jackson Arn on artist biographies, Hannah Stamler on children’s books by artists, Lucy Ives on indie presses and self-publishing projects, and more.
Lincoln Michel has started a Twitter thread of resources for the business side of writing.
For Astra, Lily Meyer considers the question of translation style and examines three Spanish novels translated by Katie Whittemore. Together, the novels Bad Handwriting, Wolfskin, and Mothers Don’t comprise the first in the “Translator Triptych” series of releases, published by the independent press Open Letter Books. “As a not-really-aside,” Meyer writes, “I do know it’s an open question whether a translator can or should have a style, given that one of literary translation’s fundamental goals is to recreate a text’s style in a new language. But translation is an art, and to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible.”
At the New Yorker, Hannah Williams recommends Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, which was published in 1979 by New Directions and was the author’s fourth and final book. “The book is a high and a comedown at once—a paroxysm of sex and booze and, above all, color,” Williams writes. “It’s that rare thing: a true underappreciated classic.”
The Center for Fiction has announced the longlist for its 2022 First Novel Prize, which includes Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-traumatic, Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Alyssa Songsiridej’s Little Rabbit, and twenty-three other titles.