For Print magazine, R. E. Hawley writes about the new trend in book-cover designs: the blob. Hawley writes that the blob comes from big publishers playing it safe as they need bigger hits and have smaller budgets. The covers are meant to appeal to the Amazon algorithm, as past successful covers inspire similar designs. Hawley observes, “What gets lost in the pivot toward safe, reliably marketable design in literary fiction is in many ways the same thing we risk losing to Amazon’s algorithmically-driven vision of readership—the thrill of encountering the unexpected.”
For The Drift, a selection of dispatches from incarcerated writers about COVID in prison. Christopher Blackwell, writing from the Washington Corrections Center, writes, “There are moments I was forced to experience that I will carry for the rest of my life, moments I haven’t been able to fully process, as we remain in the thick of the pandemic behind steel doors and razor wire.”
On October 2nd, Triple Canopy will celebrate the release of Gregg Bordowitz’s new book Some Styles of Masculinity with an event featuring Bordowitz in conversation with author Fred Moten.
For the Paris Review, Lidija Haas interviews Amia Srinivasan. They discuss what counts as philosophical writing, the possibility of being misread, and embodiment. Srinivasan describes the project of her new book, The Right to Sex: “I want us to have an ambivalent relationship to questions of what it means to render the personal political. What I’m really proposing is something that queer people for a long time have been proposing, which is just to think more imaginatively and creatively about what your desires might actually be.”
On the Apology podcast, critic A. S. Hamrah talks with host Jesse Pearson about books and movies.