Elon Musk has completed the deal to buy Twitter he initiated back in April after quietly accumulating shares starting in January. Musk reportedly has plans to unsuspend permanently banned accounts, like that of Donald Trump, and has little interest in moderating content and disinformation. In his recent Bookforum review of Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s Speculative Communities, Max Read wrote about Musk’s chaotic takeover “strategy”: “He hasn’t been pursuing a clear program, laid out from the beginning in the manner of a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, but embracing confusion and volatility and changing circumstances in the manner of a financial speculator.”
In the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Leo Robson surveys Percival Everett’s recent novels—“Satire is an obvious recourse for the lapsed logician”—and discusses all Everett has done for “the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index.”
Eric Rosenblum, who is at work on a biography of the late Katherine Dunn, writes about the author of Geek Love and the forthcoming novel Toad (unpublished during Dunn’s lifetime) for the Paris Review. Dunn’s short story “The Education of Mrs. R.” was published for the first time in the Review’s current issue; Rosenblum writes, “It’s possible readers in the seventies weren’t ready for Dunn’s vision of a woman so enraptured by the act of murdering chickens that she doesn’t have time to tend to her young daughter.”
The winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes have been announced: Hernan Diaz for Trust in Fiction, and Tanaïs for In Sensorium: Notes for My People in Nonfiction.
In this week’s 4Columns, critic and filmmaker Blair McClendon reviews Hilton Als’s My Pinup, a book about care and selfhood told through the prism of Prince. At one point, Als writes about bringing a peach pie to share with a former lover at a 1988 Prince concert. “The boyfriend refuses it,” McClendon notes. “A pie does seem too difficult a meal for a funk show. Where desire is concerned we always bring too much of ourselves, or more than we mean to, anyway.”