The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2022 grants. The winners include Hannah Zeavin, Christian Lorentzen, Damion Searls, Stephen F. Kearse, and Urmila Seshagiri, among others.
For the Verso Books blog, Francesca Peacock writes about the politics of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: “Given Ginzburg’s life-long saturation in left-wing politics, why is it now so easy to read her fiction entirely divorced from this context? Part of the reason lies with Ginzburg herself: in her writing, she was unfailingly self-deprecating about her own political knowledge.” For more on Ginzburg, see Emily LaBarge’s 2017 review of Family Lexicon and Negar Azimi’s 2022 review of three books of Ginzburg’s fiction in Bookforum.
The New York Times has announced that Max Strasser will be the new Sunday Opinion editor.
The shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize has been released. The winner, who will be announced on October 21, will win $25,000.
For the New Yorker, Jon Baskin considers David Foster Wallace’s late fiction. Baskin observes that reports of Wallace’s bad—and potentially abusive—behavior should not be surprising to his readers, since “Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink.”
Tonight at 7:30 Eastern time, Community Bookstore in Brooklyn will host a virtual event with the New York Review of Books featuring translator Mark Polizzotti and Chris Clarke discussing a new bilingual edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat.